Random part of the day: Plate 2X1 W/Holder,Vertical
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random part is 42923, 'Plate 2X1 W/Holder,Vertical', which is a System part, category Plates, Special. It was introduced in 2015 and is still in use today. It's been made in 15 colours and has appeared in 394 sets, one of the first of which was 10696 Medium Creative Brick Box.
Our members collectively own a total of 5,914,734 of them. If you'd like to buy some you should find them for sale at BrickLink.
51 likes
21 comments on this article
Another part I use for a lot of stuff, and have a whole lot of.
No variants to this one I am aware of, but it does bother me that it’s called a vertical clip when whatever is clipped to it is held on the horizontal plane. I realise the orientation refers to the holder part and not what is held by it, but it still bugs me.
Plate 1X1 W/ Holder's slightly bigger cousin
When they designed this part, do you reckon they had to put much thought into the orientation of the Lego text in relation to the clip?
@MeisterDad:
If you click through to Bricklink, you’ll see that they refer to this as a horizontal clip, for that very reason.
The (taller) younger brother of 6019, which looks to be the youngest of the "original 4" clips
4085a 1x1 clip horizontal showed up in 1980, just in time for holding classic space radios
4081a 1x1 with vertical ring (thin) was 1980 as well, the thick ring came along by 1986
2555 1x1 with top clip is technically a modified tile but does similar positioning, 1989
6019 seems to be late to the party in 1990
Now there are several pieces with the inverse connection to facilitate the construction of continuous pivots at very small scale, a recent addition to this family would be 78257 double-ended handle plate in set 10279
As someone who hasn't bought a set in 10 years for various reasons, I'm amazed at the number of new parts that I see when I look through instruction manuals for new sets. I actually didn't know this part existed until now.
@phi13:
60478 is the mating version, with a bar instead of a clip. Together they recreate some of the functionality of the old finger hinges that was lost in the shift to click hinges.
78256 is the same part, but with the clip orientation rotated 90°, and is probably the newest in the clip-plate family, if you exclude the ones that have bars designed to work with these clips.
So at present, there are both 1x1 and 1x2 plates for horizontal clips, vertical clips, and horizontal bars. There are also 1x1 and 1x2 plates with horizontal bars on both ends, but so far the double-ended clip-plate or either orientation remains elusive.
It's interesting that a Classic set was one of the first to use the new part.
Well, I obviously have some of these! I wonder which set has the most? In my collection it's 75257 : Millennium Falcon with 34 of these out of 1351 - I haven't built it yet though.
After that the set with the highest concentration of these parts is 70842 : Emmet's Triple-Decker Couch Mech - 14 out of 312 in total.
I own just eight of these apparently, in 75954 Hogwarts Great Hall. That's all. But then again, the number of post-2015 sets I have (not counting CMFs) can be counted on one hand, so I suppose that's not too great a surprise.
Wow! I thought this part was a bit older. From sometime around 2010-2012. Interesting to see how recent it actually was.
Its surprising to me that this part is so young. Mixel joints predate this part, that's just weird.
@Train_of_Thought_Creations said:
"Wow! I thought this part was a bit older. From sometime around 2010-2012. Interesting to see how recent it actually was."
@magmafrost said:
"Its surprising to me that this part is so young. Mixel joints predate this part, that's just weird."
You may be thinking of part 63868 which is very similar but was first produced in 2005.
This part was revolutionary because it allowed for larger hinged assemblies with more clutch power than a 1x1 clip.
@Zander said:
" @magmafrost said:
"Its surprising to me that this part is so young. Mixel joints predate this part, that's just weird."
You may be thinking of part 63868 which is very similar but was first produced in 2005."
sigh, yep, that'd do it. I hate it when they do that... I mean I understand why, I just... there's got to be a better way than totally renaming indistinguishable parts all the time
@magmafrost:
It’s not indistinguishable. The old one has “63868” formed into the underside, where this one has “42923” instead. Totally different.
@Zander said:
" @Train_of_Thought_Creations said:
"Wow! I thought this part was a bit older. From sometime around 2010-2012. Interesting to see how recent it actually was."
@magmafrost said:
"Its surprising to me that this part is so young. Mixel joints predate this part, that's just weird."
You may be thinking of part 63868 which is very similar but was first produced in 2005.
"
Please help: what's actually / functionally different between these two?!
@Padmewan:
Going strictly by the pictures, I can only think of two possibilities. What we see looks physically identical from the isometric view, so there may not be an obvious difference (besides the new part number). We can’t see the underside, though, so there’s a slim chance of one visible functional difference, which is if the bottom is formed more like the Type 3 1x2 jumper plate so it can accommodate a half-stud offset (I doubt this is actually the case, but I don’t have one handy to check).
More likely, this ties into a problem I recently discovered. I had some box trucks and a Routemaster bus that have sideview mirrors mounted with these new C-clips (1x1 plate, vertical clip), and a billboard with lights mounted to C-clip tiles. Packing up after one show or another, the bars mounted in these clips got knocked out of alignment, so they were held diagonally in the clip (fully seated when seen from one side, but with a noticeable gap when seen from the other). After sitting like that for a while, the clips lost their clutch. I don’t know if leaving them unattached will allow them to relax back into shape, or if this Megabloxed them (the latter used to be made of plain styrene, so leaving them built for a long time would permanently deform the parts to the point where they had zero clutch).
If this has become a noticeable problem, they may have switched these clip parts to a more durable plastic that will resist that loss of clutch even when pride open for days or weeks at a time. If they did that, the mold cavity might need to be a slightly different size due to a minute difference in shrink factor. A new design number would be issued so they don’t mix up the molds and run one material that ends up too tight, or another material that ends up too loose. Transparent parts are often given a different design ID for this very reason, since polycarbonate has a different shrink rate than ABS.
@Zander said:
"You may be thinking of part 63868 which is very similar but was first produced in 2005."
Oh, if we take both numbers into account, I own another 62 of them from 7965, on top of the ones I mentioned in my previous post. That's a lot in a single set (the most of the same part I have in any single set? I dunno, maybe), but given how the Millennium Falcon's 'roof' panels clip into place, I suppose it's fully justified.
@Padmewan said:
" @Zander said:
" @Train_of_Thought_Creations said:
"Wow! I thought this part was a bit older. From sometime around 2010-2012. Interesting to see how recent it actually was."
@magmafrost said:
"Its surprising to me that this part is so young. Mixel joints predate this part, that's just weird."
You may be thinking of part 63868 which is very similar but was first produced in 2005.
"
Please help: what's actually / functionally different between these two?!"
I was wrong: Bricklink does suggest a part variant on this element’s page (“This part has variants with and without a hole underneath the clip.”) which may help explain the two part numbers. At least Bricklink lists it as horizontal rather than vertical, but now that LEGO owns BL I wonder whether this will someday become ‘corrected.’