A quick post about a new element worthy of note as it is an unusual colour now brought to a common part.

Plate 1X2

Element ID 4649765 | Design ID 3023
Colour Bright Light Blue [BL] / Light Royal Blue [TLG]

Whilst new LEGO® elements are the raison d'être of my blog, they are not the be-all and end-all. (Does that sentence need another cliché added?) One diversion I'll be taking occasionally is to look back on parts released years ago, or even decades ago. The Old Elementary, if you like. Thanks to a now 60 year-old concept at the core of LEGO sets, System in Play, a cool old part (ooh, say like 1960s letter bricks) can sit happily in your MOCs alongside a 2013 element. But we're not going that far back just yet; only two decades.

Design ID 6079

For me, this part has long languished in my mental category of "parts that can only be used for one thing, and a rather dreary thing at that". But recently I noticed the amazing geometry of this part makes it far more flexible than I had imagined. It cropped up on some Pick A Brick Walls in UK Brand Stores last year, and after I employed that useful self-justification "why, I'm sure I'll need to make a big long fence one day", plus some egging-on from fellow addict friend SilentMode, I bought a large cup. And so it was that I began fiddling with fences and rapidly realised the original Parts Designer put seriously nice work into this element's design back in the early '90s. Nothing is wasted here.

August has seen the release of many new sets, several of which I have mentioned in previous posts as the sources of new elements and even new parts. Discussion of more new elements is to come, but today I'm devoting a post to a wonderful new part that I mentioned back in 'the early days' of this blog. (I'm surprised to realise I've been doing this for two months already!) This time around, let's see it in action and get lost in the minutiae of its geometry. Oooooo.