Inside the Lego Factory 260
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.'"
Re:Expensive (Score:2, Informative)
Exactly! Right now we are not buying our kids lego because it is so darned expensive. We get better toys cheaper.
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Legos do have much higher quality than similar "block" toys. They have higher durability and don't wear out as fast, and have more stringent quality control. They may cost more than a competitor like Mega Bloks, but they'll last longer.
Re:Molding makes designing your house hard (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Sales at the Lego Store (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Expensive (Score:4, Informative)
Lego bricks currently clock in at an average of 10 cents a piece (i.e. an 800 piece set will run you around $80, a 5000 piece set will run you around $500 dollars.)
Re:How it' s Made on Discovery (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Beginning of the End (Score:5, Informative)
Grammar nazi:That's not an analogy, it's a synecdoche [reference.com].
LEGO - Now with Sharks with Lasers (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe their operations were infiltrated by Slashdot memes...
Re:Sales at the Lego Store (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
That's not really true. Process engineers have a lot to do with the quality of plastic products. Those big injection molding machines are really finicky about temperature and pressure, and the molds have to be designed very well. Otherwise you'd get legos that shrink too much, or not enough, or worst of all - not consistently.
Legos have to strike a delicate balance between fitting too tightly and too loosely... it's actually amazing that all of the sets over the years are pretty darn compatible. It's the rare Lego that simply falls off.
Plastic quality is also important, but presumably they are just buying some standard high-quality type. (Maybe not?)
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I also find it surprising that advanced manufacturing technology hasn't driven down the price of Legos. However, this article [fastcompany.com] gives some insight into the business side of Lego and shows that the prices aren't simply inflated out of greed.
Re:Expensive (Score:1, Informative)
The Danish factory will probably close in the near future since LEGO moved a lot of their production to Eastern Europe for cheaper cost.
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
so what's your point? Factories move to china for low wages,but obviously here that's not a problem because the process is completely automatic. You only need a couple of operators to change the molds and some QC, that's about it.
Doing this in China could cost just a little less than doing it in Denmark, proving that legos are expensive "just because", and not because the manufacturing process is necessarily complex to require human intervention in every stage (like, say, clothes, that need to be sewn manually).
Re:Old (Score:4, Informative)
What you remember is probably about MEGA Bloks, the Montreal company.
Several reasons... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Try some of the competition some time (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Expensive (Score:3, Informative)
You pay VAT, the U.S. doesn't.
Re:What happened to interchangable parts? (Score:3, Informative)
You're wrong. It's simply the possibilities that have increased. If you want the simplicity of fewer kinds of part, just get simple sets - Creator, etc. Otherwise, at the very least, pretty much all parts are reusable in custom builds of a similar theme to the original set (vehicle, building, robot/mecha/spaceship). You can be inventive in your use of the detailed parts, or you can look at the original sets for hints as to how to incorporate them into your builds.
Many of the recent parts are very useful across a large range of custom building.
Sets from the last 3-4 years or so have been good in distribution of parts - certainly Lego sets went through a phase in late 90s early 00s of having a skeletal design of specialised small parts and some large ones. New sets are the best of all worlds; most themes are sets with a great array of ordinary bricks, simple special bricks (e.g. slopes), detail bricks and useful large bricks (platforms, wall panels, vehicle chassis).
Large bricks are only annoying if you don't have large amounts of ordinary bricks. When you do, they are just very useful to help size up your creations and provide support for large structures/vehicle protrusions.
Check out Lego's Shop at Home website (shop.lego.com) and see the massive sets in Exclusives and Creator (brick-heavy for ordinary bricks as well as special ones).
Re:What happened to interchangable parts? (Score:1, Informative)
As someone who has been purchasing for the last 15 years (perhaps the years you missed) I must say you are wrong. A lot of 'familiar' parts have changed over time, specifically Technic, but I think a better synopsis is a greater range of interchangeable parts, rather than an increase in specialised parts.
Using Technic as an example, I was angry when they started moving away from the studded technic bricks, but when you learn to work with the new bricks and adapt your building style you find they are possibly even more interchangeable and adaptable than the original Technic bricks.
Additionally, on 'face value' a lot of kits appear to use specialised parts, but these parts are regularly used in many other kits in different ways. In saying this, I have always stayed away from 'franchised' lego NBA,NHL,Harry Potter, Star Wars, Inidiana Jones, Speed Racer etc. because I really think these kits spoil the Lego brand.
I have heard the same "Lego is changing from building kits to model kits" over the years, but if you're still involved as time progresses you will see it provides the same imagnitive outlet it always has with even more varied and interesting parts at your disposal.
Re:What happened to interchangable parts? (Score:3, Informative)
A number of years ago, this "juniorization" process was becoming apparent as Lego attempted to make its toys accessible to younger ages while reducing the cost of nice-looking models. At the time, the company was in financial trouble and this misguided strategy ended up only making things worse.
Things seem to have reversed since then, however. Sure, there are still *some* rather specific pieces (like boat hulls) that it would be costly or difficult for Lego to sell brick-wise, but most new pieces that get introduced now are quite adaptable for custom models.
At the same time, Lego has increased their sales and income by designing better and more playable models, targeting adult fans as well as children, and improving the efficiency of their manufacturing operations.
Re:What happened to interchangable parts? (Score:3, Informative)
I made the plastic for those bricks.. (Score:4, Informative)
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..
Re:What happened to interchangable parts? (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, Lego did recently discontinue some great product lines, like the 9v lego trains.
I was off by an order of magnitude... (Score:3, Informative)
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.