How can I find the unique parts in the 71040 Disney Castle?

Question

We've been having fun putting together the 71040 Disney Castle. But we keep wondering: which parts are in this set that haven't been in any other set with these particular colors?

I've seen this information presented in other Designer Videos, but for the Disney Castle Designer Video they're spending their time playing with Mickie and teleporting from Denmark to Anaheim, CA so the unique parts are barely mentioned. For instance, they don't talk about the 19121 Fence which is new to this set in white:

I also have found bricklink's part list for it but I don't see how to filter that down to unique parts. Is there an easy way to cull this from bricklink or another LEGO set database?

Answer 1

According to the review from Rebrickable these are the parts in new colors:

Aside from the Minifigs, there are no new part designs. There are plenty of parts appearing in new colors though.

• Dark Blue 3943b - Cone 4 x 4 x 2
• Dark Blue 44375a - Dish 6 x 6 Inverted
• Dark Blue 3685 - Slope 75° 2 x 2 x 3 Double Convex
• Dark Blue 98560 - Slope 75° 2 x 2 x 3 - Solid Studs
• Dark Bluish Gray 99301 - Slope 33° 3 x 3 Double Concave
• White 18838 - Brick Arch 1 x 12 x 3 Raised Arch with 5 Cross Supports
• White 20310 - Brick Special 1 x 1 with Scroll with Open Stud
• White 19121 - Fence Ornamented 1 x 4 x 2 with 4 Studs

Answer 2

I can see two ways of getting this information, depending on your technical skills and programming knowledge:

1. Go item by item in your BL parts list and check in how many sets the item is by clicking on the link for the item. If you want to know not only the uniqueness of an item but also the uniqueness of the item in a specific color, the color drop-down above the image is a great source of info. This will be labor intensive, but you can easily skip many parts as they are very common.

2. Download the inventory as an XML file and write a program which extracts the uniqueness information from Bricklink itself. Bricklink has an API which you can use to get information about a part. Especially interesting is the superset request, which is documented here: http://apidev.bricklink.com/redmine/projects/bricklink-api/wiki/CatalogMethod#Get-Supersets.

I think that if you are not planning to reuse this process, you're probably better off with option 1 where you eliminate the items you know for sure are not unique, and then go through the tens of items left that might be unique to verify uniqueness.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Here is another way to get your answer: Brickset.com!

If you go to the product page for set 71040, you can see several tab labels you can click on. One of them is labeled "Parts".

In the Parts screen, Brickset shows all the parts that are in LEGO's official inventory, and cross-checks this with its parts database to tell you, by part, in how many sets each part is.

So to get your answer, just browse this list and find the ones that are unique to this set!