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Sidan Toys – Overview

by Thita (admin) on February 5, 2011

in LEGO Customizers

WEBSITE: Sidan Toys
LOCATION: Taiwan
ACCESSORIES AVAILABLE VIA:
A Minifig.Cat’s Store on Bricklink,
A Minifig.Cat’s Store Direct
GALLERY: flickr
PRICE: reasonable
SHIPPING: $5 flat rate (tracked & registered). Shipping over $100 is FREE.
SHIPPING TIME TO USA: 8-10 days

Sidan Toys is a Taiwan based company, manufacturing little plastic toy-figures with lots of different accessories. Sidan Toys figures are quite different from LEGO’s minifigs; they have 13 moveable joints, and can be posed in many different ways.

Although the figures differ from LEGO minifigures, their accessories are compatible with LEGO minifigs. Some of the accessories may need a little modification to fit, but most of them are a perfect match as they are and need no additional adjustment.

Sidan Toys accessories belong to two main categories; samurai & ninja, and modern combat. If you want to get accessories only for your LEGO minifigs, they are available through A Minifig.Cat’s Store, also located in Taiwan (see link to their store above).

I have been ordering only from the traditional line of accessories; helmets, weapons and armor pieces for my ninja and samurai, and accessories for my little monk. However I know other satisfied LEGO-fans who use Sidan Toys modern accessories and weaponry as well.

QUALITY: The overall quality of the custom LEGO pieces is excellent and they are perfectly compatible with LEGO. (I write more in detail about specific pieces as I work with them, so please see my other post in this category.) The plastic has a slightly different feel to it than that of LEGO pieces. I’m not sure exactly what the difference in the chemical composition is, but the plastic feels a bit harder, lighter, and more rigid – at least that’s how I would put it. This is a very minor difference though.

MOLD DETAIL: Sidan Toys elements have the same simple, yet elegant style as LEGO; clean lines, with just enough detail to give each piece a realistic look. Therefore they blend into your LEGO creations perfectly.

COLORS: (Please note that there are a lot more colors Sidan Toys carry, these are just the ones I have received and had a chance to personally review.)

Black, white and red are a perfect match to LEGO’s colors.
Yellow is slightly lighter and a tad more orangish than LEGO’s yellow.
Brown is an almost exact match to LEGO’s old brown.
Dark gray is an almost exact match to LEGO’s old dark gray.
Dark brown is slightly darker than LEGO’s dark brown.
Dark red is quite different from LEGO’s dark red. It is more like a candy-apple/crimson color.
Pink is different than any of LEGO’s pinks, it is closest to and lighter than LEGO’s bright pink.
Pearl gold is the same as LEGO’s pearl gold.
Metallig speckle silver is a pretty close match to LEGO’s pearl dark gray (but with speckles).

(You may click on any of the thumbnails below for a larger view.)

SUMMARY: If you would like to equip your LEGO minifigs with some unique custom LEGO accessories, I highly recommend Sidan Toys. Some of the accessories (especially body-wear) may need slight adjustment but most of them are a perfect match to LEGO minifigs, and fit like a glove. (You can check out my detailed reviews on the Sidan Toys Samurai Helmet, Vest and Quiver by clicking on the blue links.)

A Minifig.Cat’s Store is an excellent store with fast processing and shipping. So far I have placed 3 orders with them and had a very pleasant experience. The store has detailed pictures and description of each custom LEGO product. And if you have any question or doubt about any of the Sidan Toys products they carry just email them. They usually respond very fast.

As you may notice at the top of this post, A Minifig.Cat’s Store has both a direct store and a store on Bricklink. It seems they have most of the products at both stores, but some are listed in only one of the two locations. In my experience the Bricklink store has the larger selection, but you may want to check both to make sure you see everything available. 😉

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LEGO colors – introduction

by Thita (admin) on February 2, 2011

in Useful Resources

(Written by Maxx)

When thinking of LEGO colors, RED, WHITE, BLUE, YELLOW and BLACK come to mind to those of us over 30. If you are younger, you probably know a lot more LEGO colors; like GREEN, PINK, DARK RED, and even SILVER. But you might be surprized to learn that in the early days of LEGO most of these colors were already around! 🙂

Here is a brief overview on how LEGO colors evolved:

➡ 1949-1956: LEGO bricks are called Automatic Binding Bricks, or ABB for short. Colors are plenty and we love seeing them, as plastic is new to us and these bright colors are great! LEGO comes in 3 different YELLOWs, ORANGE, 4 GREENs, 3 REDs, 4 BLUEs (with even LIGHT-BLUE), 2 WHITEs, TRANSPARENT, PURPLE, PINK and BROWN. A wild mix of colors!

And to top it all of there are even marbled bricks! These bricks had multiple colors in them, coming in beautiful swirls. Marbled bricks were considered second-grade quality and sold for less than the full color bricks. Today it is the opposite. 😉

➡ 1956-1958: LEGO bricks are now called Mursten – meaning “brick”. The multitude of colors is downsized. We now have a steady supply of WHITE, RED, YELLOW, BLUE, GREEN and TRANSPARENT – with GREEN being very rare.

➡ 1958-1978: we now recognize bricks to be “real” LEGO, but something strange happened to them; apart from getting tubes underneath, something strange went on with colors….They all but disappeared!!!
For years on end, the only colors available became WHITE and RED. Great for building houses with roofs, but a bit boring. 🙁

There were actually a few other colors around – BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK and TRANSPARENT – but they were rare. GREEN is only seen as baseplates and trees.

Towards the end of this period we are slowly getting more colors again – BLUE, YELLOW and BLACK are becoming normal in the LEGO color mix.
With the Classic Space Sets LIGHT-GRAY reappears, and some GREEN and PINK also comes to join the LEGO world.

➡ 1978-1997: as far as LEGO colors these are the best years ever. Towards the end of this period LEGO is having a major 100 plus colors! WOW!!! Anything is possible! All colors are available! The sky is the limit!

But our dream could not last forever. The LEGO Group gets into some bad times and they are on the edge of going under. They need to reshape their product, and one of the things needed to save money is to use less colors. From over 100 different colors, LEGO goes back to about 50 colors. (At this time, DUPLO 2×2 bricks come in the most colors, numbering 46 different ones.)

➡ 1997-2003: luckily for humanity, LEGO survives and slowly rebuilds. Colors are kept to a minimum, but still we have a lot to choose from. We are happy, and can build rainbows and landscapes. Unaware of the horrible thing ahead of us…

➡ 2004 till present: the oldies amongst us think of this as a terrible, confusing period – one we would like to erase from common memory. LIGHT-GRAY got replaced by LIGHT-BLUISH-GRAY, DARK-GRAY by DARK-BLUISH-GRAY, BROWN by REDDISH-BROWN and our beloved PINK by BRIGHT-PINK. Some other colors are also changed, but not enough for us to notice.

Still LEGO is not ready with modifying colors! To save money, they no longer buy pre-colored ABS pellets (the plastic pellets LEGO is made from). They started to mix the colors themselves. The best example of this is the Harry Potter purple bus (set 4755) coming in multiple purples. Due to this change other bricks are becoming translucent against the light.

But in the end, we all love our LEGO and the colors it comes in. It feeds our imagination and makes it possible for us to build virtually anything and everything! 😀

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Sidan Toys – Overview

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