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Inside the Lego Factory
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has a fascinating report and video tour inside the Lego factory, which is full of robots and controlled by a mainframe. 'This video shows something that very few people have had the opportunity to witness: the inside of the Lego factory, with no barriers or secrets. I filmed every step in the creation of the brick. From the raw granulate stored in massive silos to the molding machines to the gigantic storage cathedrals to the decoration and packaging warehouses, you will be able to see absolutely everything, including the most guarded secret of the company: the brick molds themselves.'"
The big secret: Lego Mindstorm robots are running the factory.
I, for one, welcome our new bumpy-headed overlords.
But this still doesn't answer the "Why is Lego so expensive?" question that I've always had ever since I was a kid. The materials can't cost that much (Obviously petroleum byproducts cost more now than they did 15 years ago, but still...). Also, those looked like injection molds - which AFAIK are one of the cheapest ways to manufacture something. Don't get me wrong - I love, love, love lego. I was just always sad as a kid that I didn't have money to buy more.
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by an evil mainframe to enslave humans by hooking them on the irresistible construction toys, thus destroying productivity and creating an insatiable demand for new bricks.
So far, it's working pretty well....
Waiting for the part about the spoiled rich girl falling down the bad block chute.
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Legos have always been expensive, but a lot of people don't realize that there are plenty of used legos for sale. Ebay and yard sales are often full of them. A great deal of the time, the instructions are included or are available elsewhere.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
The LEGO factory, in all its glory, is still missing oompa loompas. Sure the whole thing is robotic which is neat... but can those robots sing songs and look frightening to five year olds?
I also remember reading a story once about a guy who makes giant works of art, using Legos like pixels. I believe they said that if you want to buy like 10,000 blue bricks, you can get bulk prices straight from Lego.
Actually, making molds is a pretty complex process. The simpler Lego designs shouldn't be too bad, but they are often 'deep' shapes which can have problems.
Designing a mold to cast properly, without visible mold lines, is a definite science.
If you are fortunate enough to live near a Lego Store, watch for discounts on overstock.
I've been doing that since my son was born. Scored a bunch of Duplo train sets for more than 50% off the retail price.
How it's made was one of the knock-offs, however, Discovery Channel did show the actual Lego factory in a segment of the show "How do they do that". It was mystifying to see that they are still hand-carving their new pieces, as opposed to CAD/CNC prototyping.
FYI, you're not supposed to count the digits to the right of the decimal point when reporting your income in terms of "N figures".
Lego people are made out of people! PEOPLE!
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Maybe their operations were infiltrated by Slashdot memes...
The thing with Lego is that if the molds aren't just right then the blocks either fall apart or jam together. Getting that right is a big factor of the success of Lego - it just feels so good when it all clicks together.
HowStuffWorks says the mold tolerance is 0.002mm. That's 500 to the milimetre.
Really... plastics shrink as they're cooled from the mold, and how much shrinkage you get also depends on how much plastic is there. Now notice that all your long Lego trusses are exactly dead straight. Even the ones that are 20, 30, or 40 years old. And the 40 year old pieces interlock perfectly with the brand new ones. That says a lot for the plastics composition too. Go check out the dash on a 40 year old Dodge and see how much it's changed dimensionally. It's all in the details.
Less is more.
What you remember is probably about MEGA Bloks, the Montreal company.
It seems lego has been moving more and more over my lifetime of 27 years from interchangable brick type pieces to specialized pieces of plastic that are really only useful with the original kit.
Granted I haven't purchased a pack in 15-odd years, but when i look at them at the store, many of the pieces are very specialized.
Am I wrong?
I remember those yellow 4x2s are a real pain when I was little. I mean it's like forcing a square peg out a round hole.
Sure... Call me when your molds and method are good enough to produce parts with tolerances of 2 microns, with only 18 bricks in a million failing QC. Reference, see page 18.
Yes, when Apple purchases Seagate HDDs, and Intel processors, and ATI video cards, they ensure that they are of a far higher quality than the Seagate HDDs, Intel processors and ATI video cards that Dell purchases.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
None of which alone explain it, but can add up.
They are very particular about the ABS they use - it has to be metals-free, historically not very easy - which used to be supplied only by Bayer (until around 1998, LEGO US was still shipping ABS pellets from Germany to Enfield CT - one worth-his-weight-in-bricks engineer got GE Pittsfield MA to spec the plastic, saving them some bucks).
The bricks IIRC are build to a tolerance of 3/1000ths of an inch. Look at bricks and try and find the gates (where the plastic in injected and detaches from the flashing) or the knock-outs (where a part of the molding machine pushed the brick out - typically these are obvious kludgy bits of a plastic toy, in LEGOs they are all but invisible) The LEGO engineers used to smile a lot as other companies' engineers searched, often in vain, for these tell-tale machine marks.
In Enfield they have a lego-brick knight statue commemorating their ISO 9001 certification. Not so sure how many toy factories hit that mark.
For a long time the place was rather labor-intensive. A 1990 tour had more people on the packing line and a series of lights to alert someone on the floor (who had to be in sight of the molding machines) to a malfunction. The same tour in 1996 this was replaced by a pager system. In all that automation, they prided themselves on never letting someone go from the factory when their role was replaced by a machine -they always had something new to be done based on a lot of R&D. Haven't been there since 2000, but I understand that pattern was pretty much unbroken.
At least in Enfield, the factory was nearly as as spotless as the HQ office buildings. I doubt every plastic-toy-cranking factory elsewhere in the world has that level of upkeep, and it's not cheap.
Making the rafts of tie-in toys means paying royalties to Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. While base sets might cheaper at WalMart now than they were at a boutique toy shops a few years back, the brand name additions likely helped keep prices off the bottom.
Enfield CT likely isn't the cheapest labor market around, which explains why, sadly, a year ago the last nut and bolt of the factory were shipped off to Mexico. Blasted sad. A great bunch of people up there.
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My mom says I'm cool.
1. They're expensive because they are built to a much higher level of quality than is typical for injection-molded plastic toys.
Have you ever seen a defective Lego brick? Or heard of a set with a missing piece? A lot of work (and expense) goes into avoiding that. Hence all the automation - if they had humans doing all that work, Lego would be even more expensive.
The bricks themselves are little marvels of engineering - they use extremely heavy, multi-piece molds, and sophisticated molding machines to keep the dimensional tolerances to within (IIRC) .001 mm.
2. They're expensive because they're very durable.
Despite the relative cheapness of the plastic material itself, you can easily find Lego that's 30 years old, has been played with by dozens (or hundreds) of kids, snapped together and apart thousands of times, and still functions perfectly.
Given that they basically don't wear out, Lego bricks are priced higher than they would be if they were intended to be replaced from year to year.
3. They're expensive because people are willing to pay for them.
As a result of #1 and #2 above, Lego has a well-deserved reputation for quality. Despite plenty of lower-priced competition, Lego continues to sell well.
You can even buy bricks that are inter-operable with Lego for literally 1/10th the price, and they still don't out-sell the real thing. Why? Because they're simply not made as well - they don't stick together or come apart as well as Lego bricks, and they aren't nearly as sturdy.
Even as an 8-year-old, I noticed that the knock-off blocks were not worth building anything out of, and quickly separated them from my "real" Legos.
If you buy the cheaper competition, you'll quickly see how much Lego's focus on Quality Assurance matters. It's not unusual for the cheaper knock-offs to have a few bricks in each set that simply don't connect at all to the others.
And those are all from the same batch - I doubt that year-to-year, or decade-to-decade, compatibility is even on the roadmap for those products.
The only problem is that most countries lack a proper public plan to recycle plastics (mostly only a couple of type of plastics used in some bottle, like PET and PEHD - but not ABS which is what legos are made from)
At risk of going off at a tangent, this is a bugbear of mine. I live in the UK, where the general public is under increasing pressure to recycle, while producers are under very little obligation to make that at all easy, say, by reducing packaging, using more easily recyclable materials, or collecting recyclable materials themselves. Similarly, councils are pushing for powers to punish people for not recycling enough while not providing the necessary facilities.
Most packaging in this country these days has little numbers to say what type of material it is, in a little recycle-y triangle logo. So, for plastics, PE is number 1, HDPE is 2, PP is 5, PS is 6, and so on. So far, so good. It goes awry when you find that a lot of the plastics can't be recycled - PE and HDPE are easy, but I'm thinking particular of PP, which is used for loads of food packaging, bottles, etc. but apparently can't be recycled anywhere.
The labels always have a little bit of text next to the recycle-y number/logo which says "Recycle where facilities available", and I'm like "Where the fuck is that then? Germany?". "Recycle where facilities available", like it's my job to hunt out some mystical place where I can recycle this stuff. Fucking idiots. Where facilities available my arse, build some fucking facilities and I'll recycle your plastic bottles.
Maybe he means action figures
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Almost 2 decades ago I worked in the color lab of one of the suppliers of the plastic granules that LEGO uses, and I can tell you that even then, LEGO had about the most tight color and quality control in place I've ever come across. That's probably why a new brick and a brick bought a decade ago are still so much alike.
I remember that most of that production was checked in double tact: twice as often during a run then any other plastic, and that included metamere checking (ensuring that the color also changes correctly when you switch from daylight to artificial light - not always a given as every pigment you use can act differently).
I've not been involved in developing the LEGO color recipes, but hats off to whoever did them from their samples - that must have taken at least a week. New stuff like matching the color of the leather going to be used in car seats was easier IMHO (although also challenging, precisely because of the metamere issues). But it was fun, albeit occasionally dangerous work, in those days some of the additives were highly toxic..
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I had some of the earlier lego people - the ones about three inches tall which were all normal bricks except the head/shoulders/arms. For some reason I usually made them into centaurs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I found a reference at Lego.uk (I've since lost it) that claims that the dies are precise to 0.005 mm. It's reasonable to assume that plastic shrinkage at least doubles that. Still, it's *way* more precise than anything else in the toy aisle.