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.

Comments

Still Not Six Sigma

[eldavojohn]

... that the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective ...

Impressive but I wouldn't call it "air tight." Six Sigma is a defect rate that many employers (including my own) constantly strive to hit. While only 18 defects per million is still impressive, the Wikipedia entry will tell you what six sigma means:

The process was pioneered by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986[2] and was originally defined[3] as a metric for measuring defects and improving quality, and a methodology to reduce defect levels below 3.4 Defects Per (one) Million Opportunities (DPMO), or put another way, a methodology of controlling a process to the point of plus or minus six sigma (standard deviations) from a centerline. Six Sigma has now grown beyond defect control.

It esentially means that if you model your product as a normal curve representing rate of failure, you need to aim for six standard deviations away from the mean failure rate. That figures out to be 3.4 per million which is a fraction of 18 per million. Believe it or not, there are many companies out there that consider their products to be six sigma.

Re:Still Not Six Sigma

[DrRobert]

Actually 1-2ppm defects is a common goal and easily obtainable with proper controls. 18ppm would be unacceptable in some regulated industries and considered an out-of-control process.

Re:Still Not Six Sigma

[balsy2001]

How easy it is to obtain depends almost entirely what you standards are. For example if you make metal forgins and you say you can live with an internal defect that is 0.25" in diameter you will be able to attain a 6 sigma process much easier than if you said your standard was 1/10 that size. The sigma level for the same product line can change just based on who the customer is. The higher the regulation of an industy and therefore necessity for quality (think nuclear or aircraft) the less likely you are to have a high sigma process because you can't tolerate the same kind of defects. That is why nuclear grade materials or aircraft certified parts are SO much more expensive than your run of the mill hardware store (home depot) parts/materials that look the same. Go back to material forgings, material that goes into a nuclear reactor has to have much smaller allowable defects than say the same material (like stainless steel) that will be used for you hammer in your house. To get material that meets the requirements you have to inspect much more product and reject at much higher rates.

Re:Still Not Six Sigma

[Rhys]

Ask them to replace the parts. They will. Usually, they won't even charge you for it, nor require the bad part back.

http://www.lego.com/eng/service/replacementparts.a sp

Worked fantastic for the one bad part from Lego I have ever received. That ranges from the early 80s through today, and yes I still get bricks in fairly high quantity.

I suspect your real problem is that your son has bricks which are not actually Lego bricks. Mega blocks and others try to be like Lego but the quality just isn't there in their bricks. I've been kicking a few out of my collection recently that I found while sorting.

Re:Still Not Six Sigma

[zero_offset]

At least in GE's implementation of Six Sigma. They found a way to take what is essentially the engineering version of the scientific process, wrap it in so much red tape that it is unworkable (a 12-step process that really had 15 steps) , and put it in the hands of every worker in the company. Originally they gave bonuses for doing it, but eventually they took those away and declared "Thou shalt not get a raise without a Six Sigma Project." What ended up happening is that people refused to make any process or product improvements unless they were part of somebody's (preferably their own) Six Sigma project.

I've seen this happen at four major companies so far (two are places I've worked, and two are places a friend has worked).

Wanna see a pure clusterfuck of total bureaucracy? Find a place that tries to combine Six Sigma and CMM.
It's buzzwordolicious!

How many times do we have to say it?

[Andy_R]

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.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[zerosix]

I beg to differ! Check it out. http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/faq.html

18. Which is correct as the plural of LEGO: 'Lego' or 'Legos'? Neither, actually. The word 'LEGO', when used as a noun, should only refer to the company that makes the product. Otherwise 'LEGO' is supposed to be used as an adjective. Thus, when referring to the pieces, neither 'lego' nor 'legos' is correct... rather one should say: 'LEGO bricks' or 'LEGO pieces' or whatever (using LEGO as an adjective -- and one should really capitalize all of the letters, and put the little 'circle-R' symbol after it (®)). This is all a matter of protecting the trademark of 'LEGO' for the company (using it otherwise degenerates the strength of the trademark). This is not to say that I use the word correctly 100% of the time... but that's the answer to the question (it's always fun/painful to read the near-flame-wars that start at slashdot.org over this topic... and generally, both sides are wrong).

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[VanessaE]

From the Wikipedia article:

"The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services."

That should settle this arguement once and for all, as this exact statement can be found on some boxes of bricks as well (though neither of the two I have handy).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but ...

[brokeninside]

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.

Re:Fahrenhuh?

[stoolpigeon]

505.15 kelvin

Re: A small addition

[DrRobert]

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.

LEGO Factory in Enfield, CT

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:LEGO Factory in Enfield, CT

[Inda]

About the only thing I never worked out is how they get them to release from the molds so cleanly...

The plastic shrinks as is cools. Simple as that.

Yes, I used to make plastic injection moulding tools. Well, that's a lie, I made the patterns that were used to cast the dies. A hammer wielding Toolmaker made the tools, obviously.

Re:LEGO Factory in Enfield, CT

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I've done a little reading about this. As another poster stated, the plastic shrinks as it cools, so you must release the part from the mold quickly. This is usually done by push-pins that are embedded in the die itself. My best guess is that ths works because ABS is fairly rigid well before it completely cools off.

If you look at anything of lower quality than a LEGO that is made of ABS, you can sometimes see where these push pins made contact with the (then soft) plastic. They kind of look like shallow circular or semi-circular depressions, almost always on the interior/hidden side of the part.

Re:915,103,765 different combinations

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.math.ku.dk/~eilers/lego.html#howgetrigh t

and here with pretty moving pictures

[way2trivial]

http://www.popandco.com/archive/moab/

i love this animation set.

Depends how long ago.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Decline in quality?

[smitty97]

I think there has been a decline in quality, it just happened earlier. New part's molds seem to have much larger radii on the corners and a rougher texture (like the mold pressure wasnt high enough), while old parts have sharp corners and a smooth finish. The best example i can find is to compare an early 80's technic bush (http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/3713) with one from a 2000+ kit.. the new ones are different enough to make them unusable for some things, like attaching an axle perpendicular to a plate. the new bushings's mating features on the one side are all rounded off, and do not fit very tight. To make matters worse, an extra circular ring under the mating areas ensures that it doesnt sit flat like the old ones. A comparison of old/new gears (http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/x187) as well will show the differences. The photos on the links show the new parts. has anyone else noticed differences like this?

Tales from The LEGO Factory

[jpellino]

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.

When I was a kid, we had to use our imagination

[Pontiac]

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.