Area man selling Lego collection worth $14K+
Thomas Neal of Greenwood has decided to sell his Lego collection, at an estimated value of more than $14,000.
Neal has enjoyed building his own creations with Legos since he got his first Lego set at age 5.
He has Asperger’s and ADHD, and has found that working with Legos fits well with how his mind works.
“My mind thinks very mechanically… If you have two pieces, you can arrange those a dozen different ways. So you multiply that by 1,000 Legos. You can lose yourself in creativity and never create the same thing twice. It’s just relaxing,” said Neal. “When I was little, it helped me cope with a lot of things and I just got a lot of enjoyment out of it.”
Over the years, he’s received Lego sets as gifts, purchased them online and bought them from garage sales, by the bin or the set. He has Legos from as early as the 1970s all the way to the present day.
His earliest Lego set is the first Lego Technic car from 1978. His favorite set is the Lego Technic No. 8880, the 1,343-piece Super Car released in 1994.
“It was the biggest and most complex set to date, for that time. It has many features and build techniques not used today,” said Neal.
It also has a special memory attached to it. “I remember sitting down and my dad and me working to complete it,” said Neal. Although he’s been collecting for decades, Neal’s hobby especially took off during the pandemic. “When COVID hit, I started stockpiling. Everyone was stuck at home, so I really had nothing else to do. My collection really exploded at the start of 2020,” he said.
Neal plans to sell most of his collection to cover some personal expenses. He priced out all his Lego sets online, which is how he came up with the $14,000 estimate. However, that’s not including pieces that don’t belong to a set. Also, some of his sets are rare enough that he wasn’t able to locate a price online, like the original 1998 Z-Nap sets that ran for one year only.
In some cases, Neal has three or four boxes of the same set of Legos.
“I will usually build at least one the way the box says, but then I’ll build two or three creations of my own next to it of the same set,” said Neal.
He also logs on to websites like rebrickable.com that allow Lego enthusiasts to view and download blueprints of other builders’ MOCs (“my own creations”).
Some of the largest Lego sets Neal has put together include the battery-operated Liebherr mining equipment replica, which has more than 4,500 pieces; and the Hogwarts Castle, which has over 6,000 pieces. He also made
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an MOC amusement park. He combined several Lego sets into one, including a ferris wheel, Tilt-A-Whirl and Zipper ride. That contained between 30,000 and 40,000 pieces, and took a couple months to complete, with Neal working on it during his spare time.
Neal is also part of some Lego Facebook groups, where people can share what they made and building techniques.
Neal has passed his love of Legos on to the next generation. His kids love playing with Legos and his niece and nephew enjoy it, too. Although he’s planning on getting rid of most of his Legos, he does plan to keep a small portion for them to enjoy. He said he enjoys giving the kids random Legos, not part of any set, and seeing what they come up with.
“It lets their imagination run wild,” he said. He hopes that the people who buy his Legos will enjoy the chance to be creative just as much as he has.
“The possibilities are endless. There’s no limit to what can be done,” he said. Neal can be reached at thomasneal_82@yahoo.com.
Editor Valorie Brecht contributed to this report.
Shown are less than half of the Legos Thomas Neal has spent a few decades collecting. His oldest Lego set is from 1978.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
