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How They Make LEGO Bricks
harajukboy writes "Businessweek.com shows us how the famous LEGO bricks are made. Among the new facts I picked up was that LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world, and that the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective." I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
My work here is dung.
The article says they make 18 billion a year! Since they've been building bricks since 1958, that means there's a HELL of a lot of bricks somewhere.
I think a recycle your Lego campaign should start and you should send all your old Lego to me.
This is not just a grab to make sure I have more Lego than you.
Because those bitty tires that come in Lego kits are directly comparable to the fifteen inch Yokohamas I just bought.
LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world
Yet, when making a car, you are hard-pressed to find four of the same set in a very huge bucket filled with Legos....
Yes, I play legos with my kids....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I just love the way the factory floor has all sorts of bits of Lego scattered across it (the Lego that escaped!)
:)
I bet they don't walk around with bare feet there.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
That they'd been making 18 billion parts per year since 1958. While the installed base of Lego bricks is enormously vast, I highly doubt that they reached a production level billions of parts per year before the eighties or even the nineties.
Has there been any research studying the effects of playing with Legos on mental development in children? It seems intuitive to me and probably others here that there is some positive correlation if not outright causality between these types of toys and intelligence.
Why bother.
"After being vacuumed up, the ABS granules are moved toward the molding machines, where they are melted at a temperature of 449.6 degrees Fahrenheit."
I'm sorry, I don't speak caveman. What's that in a real temperature?
This would have been far more interesting if they showed how they made some of their more advanced kits, robots, and intricate pieces, instead of just showing their injection molding process for a simple little block. Their production #'s are impressive, but who really cares how the 1950's technology behind making a Lego?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
You can't just stick those fancy pieces anywhere, you have to think about what you're doing or else the funny shapes obstruct somewhere else you wanted to put something.
(yeah, I've done that a lot. The Technic stuff can be a nightmare to figure out sometimes.)
"I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it to easy..."What is up with people being too lazy to type another o to spell too correctly? There is a difference between to and too!!!
It has been pointed out that “Legos” is incorrect. My apologies.
Why bother.
of these9 6
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=5
or these
http://home.hawaii.rr.com/chowfamily/lego/
or maybe these
http://www.directron.com/contest1win.html
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
But if Sigma Six measures defects per million opportunities does that not mean that each successfully produced Lego brick counts as more than one opportunity? Since there are multiple points of possible failure during the production of each brick, a defect rate of 4 per multiple millions of parts produced would be well beyond sigma six.
the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defectiveMaybe Sony could take a note from this?
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
If they were Intel they woulda sued Kellogs for using that slogan leggo my eggo. They, on the other hand, just went another route... http://www.strangenewproducts.com/2006/02/lego-sha ped-eggos.html
Why a Lego article in Businessweek?
I guess I expected to see a story about how Lego's sales have dropped off recently because kids aren't as interested in Legos or (as in my sons' case) inherited so many damn Legos there's really no point in buying any more. Or maybe something about how the company has refocused on name brand licensing in the past 10 years, with tie-ins to Harry Potter, Star Wars and anyone else with a children's movie.
But a "how are ordinary plastic bricks" made in Businessweek? Strange...
Didn't LEGO outsource their fabrication off to some other company earlier this year? I'm pretty sure it was a fairly long transition, so we may not be seeing these new pieces yet, but the sets I've bought in the past year seem "different" somehow. Colors don't seem as solid as they were years ago, and the plastic feels softer. They still snap together pretty well, but they don't seem to fit against each other as well and seams can be much bigger than I remember.
While I'm sure the machinery and manufacture process isn't changing, it would have been nice if the article could have commented on the changes being made in response to the restructuring LEGO has been doing the past couple years. It's pretty obvious to me that things are changing, but it'd be nice to have it documented.
...about the actual defective blocks that are *found* ? I mean, if 18 per million are defective, and all 18 are removed from the process, isn't this effectively better than 3.4 ppm of which all 3 are *not* removed from the process ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Actually it depends on how you define your test metric. In our industry we define the failure as ppm in the final unit for a particular test (color, shape, weight, hardnes). In a complete report you would different ppm failure rates for different aspects of the process.
Yah know. Talk like this is exactly why no one thinks geeks are fun.
> What has six sigma added to this paradigm?
A word that we, monolingual americans, can understand.
I for one welcome our new multi-colored, combinable overlords! ... Voltron?
"the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways."
Can anyone reproduce this for me?
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Slashdot has always been the stuff that Taco thinks is interesting.
Coming here and demanding that he changes his editorial policy seems slightly odd.
What? No mention of how the current lego kits all tell you what to build (spaceships, castles, etc.) while in the "Good old days" all we had were buckets of bricks and our imagination?
Yawn, standard manufacturing technology in industry.
The details of what happens are cool, but every company making moulded thermoplastics does the same thing.
The machines at LEGO aren't any different than those making toothpaste caps or rubbermaid containers, it's just a cooler product to geeks.
I've actually seen (well, as far as you can "see") Lego bricks in production. Up until this year when they announced they were going to close it (as part of moving all their production to Eastern Europe, China, or Mexico), Lego ran a factory in Connecticut. Once upon a time, they used to allow kids to tour it. I must have been in middle school or so when I saw it.
IIRC, there's nothing particularly special about the production process. It's basic injection-molding. The plastic comes in bulk as small pellets, pre-dyed (I think, I'm a little fuzzy on this), and gets fed into machines that produce the bricks. I don't think that they make or dye the plastic on-site. The vast majority of the plant, as I remember it, was actually devoted to inspection, sorting/packing, and packaging for shipment. At the time this really surprised me; the "making stuff" part of the factory was far smaller than I had thought. It was cool to see them wheeling around big bins of bricks, though. (This was before they made quite as many special pieces as they seem to now.) I really should have brought a camera but never thought about it at the time. (I think I was probably in that period of life where I was trying hard not to show that I still thought Legos were really cool.) Somebody else visited and has a few photos here.
About the only thing I never worked out is how they get them to release from the molds so cleanly, and with such straight walls (normally to guarantee mold release you avoid straight walls and sharp edges/corners). On some bricks if you look closely though, you can see mold lines and sprues if you look in the bottom carefully.
It's sad to hear that they're closing the plant in CT; I had always hoped that maybe it was heavily automated enough to cope with the higher costs of labor in a high-cost area, but it seems not. I wonder what this leaves for industry in Connecticut these days? Without Lego, their principal exports are going to be nothing but a handful of helicopter parts and lawyers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Those are boxes made from LEGO which happen to house modern computers.
// Yes, this is a shameless plug for my own machine...
This is a computing device MADE from LEGO... Three digits of mean hand cranked polynomial goodness. Only 105 turns of the crank per quadratic result!
http://acarol.woz.org/
Computing the way Babbage intended!
"the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways."
How's that?
I'm all set up now and can do more copies whenever you want.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I grew up with the kits so they've been doing that for awhile. Today there aren't as many choices - I always liked the space ones and now everything has to be god awfull starwars crap.
:).
Even with the kits, you'd play with the spaceships and eventually, you'd drop them, or they'd break apart in the bucket you stored them in. Then you got to build your own creations from the debris. The best of both worlds
I even managed to hold a few of them in my bare hands while they were still warm out of the molding machine!
Yes, I play legos with my kids....
Well, I'd hope so. It's the best reason for having kids, really.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Your imagination has been rendered obsolete.
In fact, your imagination has been patented, and you will be prosecuted if caught using it again.
In place of your obsolete, patented imagination you will now swallow any pill presented by the media: resistance is feudal.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
http://www.popandco.com/archive/moab/
i love this animation set.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The legos deep six you.
Am I? Hoookay... And your name is Billy.
...but minus several million for sound quality.
Seriously, I didn't even get halfway through the sample mp3. I blanch at the thought of the Well-Tempered Clavier on this..
It's an _awesome_ (in every sense of the word) piece of work to be sure, but it's better off just on display.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
a) Sure, of course Lego is pretty neat. You can make things from it.I especially like large-scale models with difficult engineering skills on offer (suspension bridges, etc).
b) Under most circumstances, I really do mean *you* can make things from it. For most purposes, I'd much rather have plain wooden blocks, or tinkertoys, or a box full of random vaguely stackable stuff-thing-items.
Lego are too 90-degrees, snap-to-grid oriented. Just like in a drawing program, snap-to-grid is sometimes nice, but I usually get annoyed by it, and would rather give it up as an option than have it on full-time. Blocks and other things can be manipulated to the degree of precision the user has to apply.
I wish these blocks (Kapla) weren't so expensive:
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000620.php
Also, I feel bad about any permantization of lego constructions -- it's like building models out of pennies, then welding them all together. If something's made out of scrap and leftovers, I feel no such compunction.
And the colors! Sure, the enthusiast will have barrels of all the right colors he needs for a 3D Mona Lisa reconstruction, but mostly I've seen piles of cloying, crayon-pack colors. Never enough black, never enough grey, never enough light blue.
Hmm. Maybe I should put in action my plan to buy lego whenever I see them in thrift stores, so I could have enough to not feel bad if they're tied up in one thing rather than another, and to get enough of a decent color choice.
But still, that limited range of motion! The perpendicular angles thing!
Also, I don't know if lego tech has vastly improved, but as a kid I always wanted the interlocking sections to be just slightly grippier. After all, if we're going to live with them, might as well get the maximum benefit! It's too easy for a lego skyscraper to crack in the middle -- they're too susceptible to lateral force!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it to easy..."
While I am sure they are going in the direction of easy, you probably intended to say that kids these days have it too easy.
THE PANDA STRIKES AGAIN!
There may be places where you need to speak apologetically about your use of LEGO. Slashdot is not one of them.
From 1975 to 2006 they made a lot of stuff for the U.S. market in their factory in Enfield, Connecticut. (Which apparently was quite the state-of-the-art operation when it was constructed.) You can read the local paper's article about the first round of layoffs here.
Ultimately, their plan is to offshore everything including manufacturing and logistics. The Enfield operations will mostly go to Mexico and China, where the production is being subcontracted out to Flextronics; about a third of their headquarters factory in Denmark is being cut, with production moving to the Czech Republic.
Apparently they're going to keep making some of the Bionicle parts in the Billund factory, but the writing is pretty much on the wall: it's all headed East eventually.
As for the apparent decline in quality, I can't find any information on whether they've started to ramp up production from Flextronics or the Czech factories yet, or if they have, how long it would take those parts to get into circulation (the layoffs in CT only started in 3Q2006) so I'm not sure that the decline is attributable to offshoring quite yet. It could just be that simultaneous with or prior to the decisions to move production, they attempted to cut costs by reducing QC expenditures, and that's why things have slipped.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sad that whoever wrote TFA isn't a real Lego person. Otherwise he'd know the correct terminology isn't "stud" but "bump". Kids never say "I need a six studded block", rather a "six-bump".
Yeah, and when you're buying legos, it feels like you're buying a set of real tires too.
I always wondered how such small plastic pieces can possibly cost so much. So far I've spent like 200$ on legos, and I'd have to spend at least that much again to have what I'd call an "acceptable set" (need stuff like minifigures, baseplates, wheels, doors & windows badly).
The base plates? (very thin) 8$, or 15$ for the large one!
The set of 30 or so basic minifigures? Over 60$! (can't buy less at a time either!)
Isn't PVC dirt cheap? And from the article, seemingly there's almost no labor involved, the plastic injection/molding machines and conveyors and such are all automated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik
Not as much visual appeal and pretty colors, but way more functional.
"Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff."
Sadly, I think a lot of us here still do.
/* No Comment */
In 30 years of buying Lego (first for myself and now for my son), I'm impressed that I only once bought a set (last year) that had a single missing piece. I called the 1-800 number on the box and the agent talked me through a long but obviously well documented process to determine exactly which part was missing. The part arrived in a couple of days and my son's T-Rex had it's tail joint. If only all companies had that kind of customer service.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
"I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it to easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff."
...and we had to walk 15 miles to and from school... in snow storms.... uphill... both ways!
This is interesting timing considering I bought my first lego set in years just a couple of weeks ago.
I have to say building blocks, and legos in particular, are some of the best toys out there. These toys require decent visual-spacial abilities to assemble and very basic understanding of structures and engineering concepts, at least if you don't want something to collapse on your. And probably more importantly they inspire the imagination. There's not much out there that is quite this good, not even most so-called learning toys. Even computers I don't think necessarily provide as much value, at least not when kids do nothing but chat, visit mySpace and play games.
I do have to add that I don't quite like what I've seen from Lego in recent years with all the overly custom parts. I don't really like the who Bionicle line either, but I do understand Lego's need to stay relevant. And they seem to have addressed some of the issues with the custom pieces more recently.
I like smart-alecky comments as much as the next guy but that article is like the perfect blend of geek and genius with a bit of CS thrown in. Let's have everyone see it.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
is a collective noun!
I carve my own Lego out of bricks of solid gold! I've never had a defective one yet!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
From when I was a kid, that and a tub of stuff called Tente which I collected for a number of years. It was a Spanish building block with lots of themed stuff and specialised pieces, I'm not sure if they're still around. They weren't compatible with Lego blocks though.
The problem with having a big tub of lego is that it's never just lego in the tub, like you'll find odd little things in there too, like plastic rings from the fairground, matchbox cars, maybe some playdough stuck to a flat piece of lego.
Task Mangler
The hypnotising show about manufacturing, How It's Made, covered Mega Bloks a few seasons ago. Sadly, I can't find the video online, so you'll have to find it on TV (The Science Channel in the US, as well as many of the Discovery Channels), but you can be hyponotized by other of their videos on YouTube, although considering the drop in frame rate on YouTube, this is one of the worst shows to watch online.
Incidentally, the LEGO company is the second most reputable company in the world, according to Forbes.
Legos legos legos.
Legos.
Bite me, nitpicking asshat.
I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
;)
Actually, my daughter and I were making houses, cars and furniture with her LEGO bricks last night, and I commented to my wife that it was more fun when I was younger and the pieces were more generic. It feels like you're being coerced into building the specific sets on the box because the custom pieces aren't that good for much else, though you can come up with a really wacky-looking couch for your little lego people to sit on.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Hell, that article is more interesting than the BusinessWeek one that's on the front page. Not only Mod Parent Up; put parent on Page One.
I'm getting tired of people complaining about "special" pieces. Whine, whine, whine. No one is forcing you to use them. Just because your building from 1979 was a piece of multi-colored garbage doesn't mean that's how it should be today.
And while I admit they seem to be getting lazy about it (look at some of the new Lego City planes), you still need an imagination to use those pieces for your own models.
I was happy, though, with the new Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" model. Yes, there's the engines and nose cone, but the rest of the plane is strictly bricks (or so it seems from close examination). It may be hard to tell from the website, I have the catalog in which it's quite clear, and quite unlike the other planes they've recently released.
Moreover, Lego is really quite expensive - most models hover somewhere around the $0.10 per piece. This Boeing, despite being a licensed product, is way under that.
And for purists, there's always Bricklink.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I used to work for a long distance company that used to guarantee 99.9% availability for DS1 circuits, which sounded good at the time. Most customers didn't realize that guaranteed 99.9% availability meant that there could be over 8 hours of outage during a year.
>> Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
Probably in the same time where you could fix everything with duct tape and more nails.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
and you can be sure that while the basics of squirting molten plastic into a mold and squeezing it with hydraulics haven't changed since the '50s, there are plenty of high tech temperature/pressure controls, servomotors, PLCs, etc. controlling that seemingly simple process. Factory automation has come a long way since injection molding started.
5 044780908&q=pick+and+place&hl=en
Most people have absolutely no idea how something as simple as a Lego brick is made. Or the amount of skilled labor that is involved in making the molds and tooling used.
I'm not sure what more you might see from looking at production of their more modern products, as at their core they are still injection molded plastic parts. Illustrating the process with the basic brick is probably a good idea, as nearly everyone has seen one at some point in their life.
What the modern stuff adds is a lot of electronics, which is also mass-produced by automated machinery. If you want to see a typical example of a machine that stuffs and solders PC boards, look here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-80014702
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
So, what's with the inadequacy and obsessing?
Billund is still manufacturing, but it's moving to Czech Republic, real soon now.
Enfield is moving its manufacturing and packing to Mexico, that should be complete by March.
They'll be hoding an internal job fair sometime this winter - if you want some creative, dedicated folks, you'll find them there.
Our FIRST team was sponsored by LEGO for several years until 1998 - we were working in their machine shop and got to see a great deal of the facility.
Back around 1990 when the original LEGO TC Logo came out, we worked with them on a few projects.
They're an amazing bunch, from the shop techs to the engineers to the line staff to the model team (still based in Enfield).
There are bowls of LEGO on every conference table, not just for brand vanity, but for people to toy with as they discuss and solve problems. There's even an offshoot company, LEGO Serious Play that does corporate team training based on doing things with LEGO.
One of their points of pride is that as they increased automation, they only displaced workers to other areas of the factory, they (at least back then) never tossed someone out of the site as their existing job was automated.
In 1990 the packing lines were controlled by an amazing array of personal computers, Apple II, PC, I believe we even saw a few Commodores.
They since standardized. The machines also page the engineering staff when there's an issue with one, this replaces the sound and light alarm they used to have.
They've had two sorts of molding machines - one series that let the bricks and flashing fall through to sorters, and another where arms picked up the flashing and let the bricks drop. People touring would ask why some were robots (= had arms) and others weren't!
Some of the parts are assembled on the lines, most are simply picked, sorted and packed into those perforated bags. If you notice the tiny dot on a minfig head, that's where the high-contrast optical system aligns each minifig head to the body. It's very cool to see.
We had engineer/parents from other companies who used the same molding machines and could not believe the quality LEGO was getting - I believe their quoted tolerance was 3/1000 of an inch. Look for "gates" where the plastic entered the mold, or punches where the machine tapped the brick to free it - good luck finding either - then remember what your scale model kits looked like.
First time through, we saw pallettes of boxes from Bayer. When I asked the engineers what they were getting from Germany, the answer was ABS plastic. Yes, they were shipping raw plastic over here, they're very particular - no metals allowed whatsoever. One of their engineers managed a program to get plastics from GE in Pittsfield MA 50 miles up the road to do the same thing - the savings reportedly bought them about 7 years time here in CT.
There are no heaters per se in a LEGO molding machine - the pellets are fed through increasingly smaller feed tubes by arbors, and the pressure and friction creates the heat. When they hit the molds, the plastic is about the consistency of toothpaste. They have a rogues gallery of sculptures created by leaks.
They filled a 55 gallon drum every night with the bricks that get swept off the floor - we offered to help them get rid of those, but they recycle them - I believe to a comb company.
Our second year at FIRST, the robot was approximating an arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist. The ergonomics of the standard joysticks and buttons were a real challenge. So the team built a "waldo" out of LEGO, where the operator could lay their hand into it, and the robot would respond to the movements of the hand. All was well until the judges reminded us that LEGO was not in the kit of parts of alllowables list. They did offer us the chance to take our allowance of PVC pipe and moplding LEGO bricks out of that, and building the waldo out of them. The two LEGO engineers looked like someone just suggested they use Waterford crystal to haul horse manure. We went back to joysticks.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
A *long* time ago, in about 1971, LEGO opened the first LEGO manufacturing plant outside Denmark -- or to be more specific, they licensed a Sampsonite company to produce LEGO bricks. It was in my hometown of Loveland, Colorado, and I can't find any good web links except for a passing reference in this pdf which is a shame because the original plant is still standing and its exterior design is clearly LEGO-influenced. The windows are enormous 1:2 rectangles with eight huge circular extrusions on them, just like a 2x4 cube.
As kids, we all envied the children whose parents worked there because they'd come home with garbage bags of floor sweepings and those kids could build houses we could actually get inside. The local library had several models of famous houses/buildings that, again, were large enough to crawl into.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Yeah, and what's with the dearth of pirates? I'll give them some small credit with the new knights being fairly cool, but they've discontinued all the classics except for those damned trains nobody likes.
Good thing my kids will inherit all my old LEGO bricks (happy yet, you soul-killing trademark Nazis?), and won't have to subsist entirely on the few new ones that are worthy.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Please stop feeding the troll. It's painful to watch. :)
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.Thats how I felt a couple years ago.. Almost every Lego kit I looked at would only build what was on the cover..
My step sons new Technic 8288 Mobile Crane and a bunch of the kits out now remind me more of the old Lego I remember.
Yeah the bricks are different.. most are just sticks with holes you link together but they open up new ways to build.
I remember the Technic 8860 set I had as a kid.
It built a car with working suspension, steering, rear differential, a 2 speed shifting transmission, 4 cylinder engine with a crank and pistons that turned when the car moved.
Some of the stuff I see today is almost as cool as I remember that set was.
I gave what I had left to the kids.. over half the sets are missing but they still have fun with em.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
to mention Brick Films.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
The old basic bucket with bricks, wheels windows and doors is still alive and well at your local Wal-Mart or target store.
Hell it's the only one I see in stock all the time year round.
Take a few basic tubs and mix in a technic kit or two and the kids can build about anything.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
What is this slownewsday tag bullshit?
Is a 25+-ton-force injection-molding apparatus for producing some of the best geek toys around cool or is it not?
Answer for the slow-of-wit: Yes, it's cool! It kicks ass on any news day.
First set realistic tolerances. Use with good quality raw material. Use good quality tooling. Use well trained, alert, and competent employees. Have quality control verify that everything is according to Hoyle. And most important: ELIMINATE EVERYTHING ELSE. If QC is finding bad parts, there is either something wrong with the material or something wrong with the tooling or (most likely) some unnecessary thing gumming up the works.
-
I worked in injection molding development.
It is injection molding, I will admit the words in the article are misleading.
The clamp force doesn't squish the plastic, it is used to seal the mold so it doesn't leak plastic.
In general for high volume thermoplastics production they use injection molding. LEGO definately injection molds their bricks.
I couldn't agree more, and have been saying the same thing myself for years. They should make some subtitle - like some have "No Glue Required" - such as, "Now without Requiring Imagination".
I just don't get all these toys today that say "let your kid use their imagination", when everything is displayed for them. Sure, learning games might help them learn but not really discover. There are some, but the vast majority seem to just spoon-feed everything to kids. That may yield more book smarts, but common sense will often get you farther in life.
Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
Imagine that!
Have you read my journal today?
Those are miniature tires that lego makes, not real full-sized ones.
Well, I should say that the difference is probably at least one order of magnitude. I think that is a large enough difference to be significant.
Isn't the plural of lego(s) "Legolas?"
...I can pass that programming interview for that hip Web 2.0 company!
I did, but someone who was probably mad at me for another reason modded me down.
Despite that, I got a catalog the other day with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Except for the engines and nose cone, it's basically all just bricks. Might be hard to tell from the online image though. I was really impressed.
Lego is also somewhat expensive, most kits hovering somewhere around the $0.10/piece mark, and even though the Dreamliner is licensed property, the cost per part is way under that, and it's probably because it doesn't use a lot of special pieces.
For the record, though, I don't mind the special pieces at all. After all, using them in other creations can be just as creative. There's no point in longing for the days when you built a boat that didn't look like a boat and had every color in it when you can built a fairly nice creative boat now, unless you also pine for the days before microwave ovens and cell phones.
My biggest problem with Lego is that my creations wouldn't use special pieces, but my visions of grandeur are far greater than the fatness of my wallet.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Unless you have more than one login yourself ...
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
... I don't think I've racked up sixty thousand miles on any of my lego tires.
Yep. That's my problem with the new Lego as well. All of the special parts are fun, but they do tend to direct kids a bit. The worst are the Lego people. They impose a scale on the model building and therefore limit the imagination to a certain degree. I try to encourage my kids to forget about the Lego people. They also have the benefit of a large collection from when I was a kid -- mostly basic blocks.
Sorry. Was just intrigued. Wondering if he'd say or do anything interesting if prodded.
Do people still care about that? That's like sooooooooo 1990's.
I saw that lego this year released a NEW set that allows you to build BUILDINGS !! I think the last time they did this was in 1962, when they release
...
Lego Set #717, which is the set that I was given in 1966, when I was 4 years old.
These days, kids hate legos because they spend most of the time looking for that custom piece that is lost in SOME OTHER LEGO SET of theirs. Or, because there are 17,298 different lego pieces, they spend most of the time searching a big pile of legos for piece #12821 to finish that model in the photograph...
After finishing the model in the photograph, kids either fall asleep, exhausted, or head for the kitchen for 10 cookies and a huge glass of 4% fat chocolate milk
Hexasigmoidal (adj.)? Hexasigmism (n.)?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It will also prepare them for life as an adult. You know where you watch other people do things instead of doing them yourself. Like sports and cooking.
Even as a kid (late 70's), I would often wish for all manner of special parts that did not exist. At one point, being very much into airplanes, I wanted a part that was a curved hull peice. I actualy drew it up and sent it to lego hopeing that might produce it. Some years later they actualy did make some pieces for making airplaces, though they were not curved.
But then, when I saw the original castle set compared to the new one, I was very upset. They went from lots of bricks to those giant premade wall peices that couldnt be used for anything else, and really just didnt look nearly as cool (it was a castle after all, it should be made from bricks!).
Over the years lego has disapointed in many ways. But then they redeem themselves with things like the robotics sets (which got me back into lego after many years).
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I for one welcome our plastic multifaceted toy overlords.
This person must either be an "engineer" or the standards for training engineers must be very low in the US. Maybe brain damage after receiving qualifications? No engineer with a modicum of sense would oppose the metric system for any reason other than difficulty of adoption.
meh
more cutsom piece gives kids more tool for the imagination, not less.
Lego does not create an imagination, it is an utlet for imagination.
sheesh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
did a Barbie tie in.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm so old that when I started playing with Legos in the early sixties, there were only two colors available- red and white. With grey platforms to build on. They didn't even have angled ones to make roofs with. No motors, no figurines, no wheels, no nothing. And we liked it!
Goddam kids! Get off my lawn!
I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
Yeah-- Erector sets were like that too at one time. Check out what they're like now. You get a set, and it's designed to build one thing. It's more like a model kit than a building set. It's obvious why, that way you have to buy more stuff-- if you had a totally generic building set you'd never need anything else, and we can't have that, can we?
Wow, that sounds difficult. Why didn't you use your hands?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If they manafactured tires they'd need a lot of sleep.
http://drew.corrupt.net/bp
You, sir, are gay.
See, now you're making it sound as if it were a bad thing.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Queer dolt.
That's crap. We churn out very complicated silicon chips and the upper limit of acceptability is 50 DPPM (defects per million).
We hit 18 DPPM or lower all the time!
Lego's are just pieces of plastic, 18 DPPM is actually kind of sucky in that regard!
It has EVERYTHING to do with science and technology... or at least people in the field. Most techs grew up around legos as their main toy practicaly every day for months at a time. It's part nastelgia, but Lego runs a REALLY tight ship... FEW companies can run 18 PPM manufacturing lines, get 100-200 and have QA pick out the bad ones or rework them... and we're not talking "out the door" which even auto makers can't achive... but "OFF THE MACHINE"!!! 18ppm on the first try is amazing for any industry. That makes it DOUBLY interesting!
Most techs? You are an idiot.
Green peg.
Eat my balls.
You'd like that wouldn't you, big boy!
These are the best pics of legos 'in action' I've ever seen:
http://drew.corrupt.net/bp/series1.html
Freakin hilarious - seriously, who has the time to set these up and take these pics?!
Libertas in infinitum
No, just to have them savored. Savor them.
I declare you the winner.
Not quite sure what you;re the winner of. This was a battle of wits and I'm sure at least one opponent was unarmed.