I wish one of their competitors would take up this dimension standard --- it would be a lot more useful for making structures which interact across dimensions/rotations.
More than just bricks fitting into each other at a superficial level, it matters how firmly they fit together, and it's one of the areas where LEGO is generally superior to the similar types of bricks.
A detail I didn't realise until I was an adult was the difference between the black and grey technic connecting pins. They look interchangeable, and for a lot of things they are.
But there's a fraction of a mm raised lines on the black one, and it's enough to produce significantly more friction, and that difference is utilised in designs.
And apprently there's now a new version of the black one, and people notice these things, and measure them - this article gives an idea of just how these tiny changes, well below tolerances for some of the "knockoffs", can produce a different effect:
>The frequently cited "0.002mm tolerance" is misleading without context. LEGO's actual mold precision is 10 microns, but different features have different critical tolerances.
The article never mentions what piece has a 0.002mm tolerance. Is there any such piece? If there's no such piece, then "0.002mm tolerance" is not just "misleading without context", it's straight up false.
After working in automotive, this is less impressive than it appears.
Tons of dimensions on 100k/yr injection molded(and otherwise) parts have similar dimensions. (Although admittedly, after testing in pre-production, I don't know if they are tested again and have drift)
Lego has been making the same parts for decades and their parts are extremely simple. I imagine their 1-off parts for intellectual property based sets do not have this requirement.
I think Lego has a huge incentive to promote this idea that they are high quality to justify the enormous price of decades old technology.
> A 2x4 LEGO brick manufactured in 1958 will snap perfectly onto a brick molded this morning in Denmark, China, Hungary, Mexico, or the Czech Republic.
In the late 90ies, I regularly played with my uncle's old LEGOs from the late 60ies and early 70ies. They were stored in an unheated attic for 25 years. I remember that some of the old bricks didn't "snap" at all anymore to my newer bricks. They were either extremely difficult to stack onto a new brick, or didn't have any friction left.
Lego is one of those companies that is simultaneously amazing and kind of sucks. On one hand the core product is incredible. The tolerances on the bricks are micrometer-level precision and the fact that pieces from the 70s snap perfectly into ones made today is mind blowing.
On the other hand, a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageous. Printed bricks get replaced with stickers and many sets feel like display models than something you can play with. The Mindstorms/NXT line had huge potential but then just sort of fizzled out. And the push towards smartphone-dependent toys feels weird. Who actually wants their kids staring at a phone to play Lego?
It's so sad, because the core product is basically perfect.
Historically Lego was a construction toy. This is what it was in my youth. These days Lego sell model construction kits - most are constructed once and then the owner plays with the model. This represents a radical and fundamental change. I’m not sure when it happened or how suddenly it happened as there is a large (decades) gap in time since I played with Lego as a kid and my current exposure to Lego via my own kids. Our home is full of Lego models but I don’t recall seeing my kid using his vast amount (compared to the shoe box I used to store my Lego as a kid) of Lego to actually construct something. The “studless” change - with its inside-out building technique makes it virtually impossible to alter a model once built - unlike the old bottom-up approach where it’s trivial to alter. It makes me sad because I remember with nostalgia the hours I spent building all sorts of fanciful constructions with my box of generic Lego pieces but I also acknowledge that model building — which I do with my kids - is also fun. But it’s just not the same play/toy as it was years ago.
Set prices are a lot more reasonable if you stay away from the branded options, Disney and Star Wars sets, especially have a intense premium associated with them.
If you're not interested in the new sets, the core product is readily available. Moreover, enjoy the fact that you can get that bucket of bricks for cheap partly because the expensive shiny high-margin SKUs provide a subsidy.
Yes they are aggressively targeting "grown ups" with many sets, but they also have very playable sets. I don't see any problem with having different offerings.
There are enough sets for everyone to find something interesting if they are into Lego.
If you buy any knock off legos, you are guaranteed 3 things, 1. Crappy instructions 2. Noticing the snap pressure is inconsistent and often too tight our bouncy. 3. Swearing at that manufacturer after every page.
For me, the beauty of Lego was just a huge bin of interconnectable parts that I used to make whatever my imagination came up with. For my kids, Lego is pre-built model airplane set that they build one time and then display. I liked my Lego better :)
I've never regretted buying Legos for my kids. Yeah, the kits can be expensive, but they last forever. We've thrown out or donated lots of old toys, but the Legos will never be given away.
In terms of toys which my son got from my childhood, Duplo and Lego stick out. We kept everything; booklets and parts. We built the classic town square (set 1592) recently, and we've got all the parts, including the statue bits! Only the printed lettering on the sign's 1×8 white brick had faded.
Sure, some puzzles and books survived, but the Lego stands out. If he ever has children they are in for a treat…
Lego's original moat was their patent. This expired in the 80s, and so their new moat became their manufacturing tolerances. None of their competitors could match the quality of their product. This lasted until about the 2010s when clone brands in China finally caught up, and coincidentally, Lego's own quality started slipping. Thus, they needed a new moat, and the choice was obvious: licensing.
This is an LLM-written article. It also doesn't say anything. I get it that it's a cue for us to reminisce about childhood and say that LEGO isn't what it used to be, but we're being played for clicks. Open the article and look for a single statement that actually tells us something meaningful. It's just a sequence of impressively-sounding factoids like this:
> A 2x2 brick can withstand over 4,000 Newtons of force, which lets children build tall structures.
> But in an assembly system like LEGO's, small errors accumulate. Stack ten bricks end-to-end and the cumulative tolerance is ten times larger. This is why LEGO models larger than 1 meter become difficult to build
> The lesson isn't that everyone should match LEGO's tolerances. It's to understand what your product actually requires, then build your manufacturing system to deliver that at the scale and cost your business model demands.
We use a Lego phantom[0] to control for geometric distortions in a few of our MRI studies. The tolerances are so tight that it works really well. Especially important in multi-site studies.
Was this written using AI? It does contain some interesting information, but the same information is repeated (with small variations) over and over again in a mind-numbing way that made me stop reading after about half of the article...
The tolerance for interference fit ("clutch power" in Lego terminology) is important, but that's fairly simple. It's the cumulative tolerance when you assemble large structures that's important. Knockoff bricks can be fine for the first few you assemble, and then as the structure gets larger things don't quite fit together.
Also interesting is that in very large models, there is decoupling between sections. Lego has design rules for how large a well connected chunk of Lego can be, which are driven by the tolerances. Above that you are then loosely coupling those large "chunks".
That's actually not too difficult. So long as your process variance is centered around nominal, the stackup will tend to cancel out. You might run into trouble if your kit involves hundreds of identical pieces from the same batch being assembled together, but that's rare. For large builds from multiple kits, it's very unlikely they have the same errors.
Both of my boys (9 and 11) still enjoy both the sets and the classic Legos. They're constantly building trucks, trailers, etc. One even designed his own working dump-truck. They're still great toys for imaginative play, and the fact that the sets can be broken down and used in new ways just keeps the fun alive. My oldest even designed and had his grandpa build him a lego table with a removable/reversible top so he could paint different geographies for his cities and whatnot that he likes to build.
Worth mentioning that tolerance is that low for multi-stud pieces. For an individual stud it’s closer to 0.02mm but as you add more studs tolerance spec goes up.
I would like to better understand the reasoning behind what the author says here:
A balanced 16-cavity mold costs 3-4x more than a single-cavity mold but only produces 16x the parts, which is why they only make economic sense above 500,000 units.
In this context, a cavity produces one part. A cavity can only produce, lets say, 200k parts. If you produce 400k parts, you only need a single mold, but you've only used 25k wear on each cavity, but you paid more for the mold instead of only 2 of the cheaper single-cavity molds.
44 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadMy recent experience calls bs on pulling them apart.
https://archinect.com/features/article/149974598/the-brief-a...
I wish one of their competitors would take up this dimension standard --- it would be a lot more useful for making structures which interact across dimensions/rotations.
A detail I didn't realise until I was an adult was the difference between the black and grey technic connecting pins. They look interchangeable, and for a lot of things they are.
But there's a fraction of a mm raised lines on the black one, and it's enough to produce significantly more friction, and that difference is utilised in designs.
And apprently there's now a new version of the black one, and people notice these things, and measure them - this article gives an idea of just how these tiny changes, well below tolerances for some of the "knockoffs", can produce a different effect:
https://ramblingbrick.com/2021/01/27/what-if-they-introduced...
The article never mentions what piece has a 0.002mm tolerance. Is there any such piece? If there's no such piece, then "0.002mm tolerance" is not just "misleading without context", it's straight up false.
Tons of dimensions on 100k/yr injection molded(and otherwise) parts have similar dimensions. (Although admittedly, after testing in pre-production, I don't know if they are tested again and have drift)
Lego has been making the same parts for decades and their parts are extremely simple. I imagine their 1-off parts for intellectual property based sets do not have this requirement.
I think Lego has a huge incentive to promote this idea that they are high quality to justify the enormous price of decades old technology.
In the late 90ies, I regularly played with my uncle's old LEGOs from the late 60ies and early 70ies. They were stored in an unheated attic for 25 years. I remember that some of the old bricks didn't "snap" at all anymore to my newer bricks. They were either extremely difficult to stack onto a new brick, or didn't have any friction left.
On the other hand, a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageous. Printed bricks get replaced with stickers and many sets feel like display models than something you can play with. The Mindstorms/NXT line had huge potential but then just sort of fizzled out. And the push towards smartphone-dependent toys feels weird. Who actually wants their kids staring at a phone to play Lego?
It's so sad, because the core product is basically perfect.
Yes they are aggressively targeting "grown ups" with many sets, but they also have very playable sets. I don't see any problem with having different offerings.
There are enough sets for everyone to find something interesting if they are into Lego.
I thought this forum was for intellectual discussion, full of intellectual people. You're a pseudo-intellectual at best.
Sure, some puzzles and books survived, but the Lego stands out. If he ever has children they are in for a treat…
> A 2x2 brick can withstand over 4,000 Newtons of force, which lets children build tall structures.
> But in an assembly system like LEGO's, small errors accumulate. Stack ten bricks end-to-end and the cumulative tolerance is ten times larger. This is why LEGO models larger than 1 meter become difficult to build
> The lesson isn't that everyone should match LEGO's tolerances. It's to understand what your product actually requires, then build your manufacturing system to deliver that at the scale and cost your business model demands.
I know I'm tilting at windmills, but come on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_phantom
Also interesting is that in very large models, there is decoupling between sections. Lego has design rules for how large a well connected chunk of Lego can be, which are driven by the tolerances. Above that you are then loosely coupling those large "chunks".
Initially I thought this meant a lego minifig head has 128 internal cavities, but finally realised it means a single mould now makes 128 heads.
A balanced 16-cavity mold costs 3-4x more than a single-cavity mold but only produces 16x the parts, which is why they only make economic sense above 500,000 units.