I’ve lately been distracted by my newest LEGO obsession: monofigures. In fact I’ve been so distracted I haven’t finished posting my custom Ninjago minifigures. So, a break from that to post about monofigures. When I received my 40178 LEGO VIP set last year it came with a red monofigure and I thought, “That’s neat, but I’ll never start collecting those.” Even as it came out of my mouth the seed was planted. Then my son started removing the red figure from the set to play with because he thought it was cool. So I decided to BrickLink his bothers and him each one for Christmas. I did red, green, and blue since they were abundantly available colors. I also thought that would satisfy my need to accomplish the challenge of collecting the pieces of a monofigure from BrickLink. I could not have been more wrong.
I soon started a BrickLink monofigure wanted list and set out to discover all the available colors I could collect. I looked through known hand and head colors and soon came up with a list of over 30. I knew there must be a complete list somewhere online and I found monofigs.com had all the information I needed. I had missed a few of the newer colors and discovered medium lavender was possible with a hip/leg change. There are currently 38 possible monofigs, not including chrome-gold and chrome-red which are only available attached to a keychain. A few of the colors are only possible by wiping the printing off torsos and heads with Brasso.
After using Brasso for my custom Ninjago minifigures I felt confident using that method in my collection. I went through the stash of minifigure parts I had accumulated and started assembling what I could. White was my first complete figure and it did not require any wiping. I had everything for black but the hands, which surprised me because they seem so common.
Then, after Christmas when I was ordering my sons things from BrickLink, I checked each of the stores I was ordering from against my wanted list and started my collection in earnest. When I had a small assortment, I spent an evening wiping off printing and the above photos are the results. They lost a little of their shine and polishing them again with Brasso (a tip from multiple internet posts) didn’t help. I’ll keep working on it.

Monofigure arms
Since some un-printed monofigure pieces are only available on one minifigure they can get pretty expensive. For example, the dark pink leg assembly of the Delores Umbridge minifigure was going for more than 10$. Not surprising since her complete figure was going for 90$ and above. I am perfectly happy to wipe the printing off less expensive pieces, like this dark pink leg assembly that is only .25$. So I am off on my next LEGO quest armed with small bags of monocolor arms, legs, and heads to prove it.