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Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

thewave.engineer

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Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#161

Post by atomicnumber3 »

potatototoo99 wrote: post #156
mmustapic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lego was always expensive, you can compare prices adjusted for inflation. For example, the 1979 Galaxy Explorer https://brickset.com/sets/497-1 > was around $32, that's $144 today. The reimagined set from 2023 https://brickset.com/sets/10497-1 > was sold at $99, $106 today. Not only it is cheaper, but much larger and with many more pieces.

Yes, they have kept up with inflation, and that is the problem. Manufactured goods like Lego bricks should fall in price through innovation in processes, scale, etc. What does raise higher than the average inflation should be be labor-intensive products/services. In other words, it feels much stranger today how expensive Legos are compared to 47 years ago.

Lego is branding, curation and quality bar, though. They're the Apple of bricks (weird sentence).

There's tons of lego-knockoffs and of not even such lesser quality that the difference can be perceived by casual inspection. The set-to-set quality bar is really where it is, especially among their set lines not targeted at children or low-end of market.

But none of those sets have any kind of staying power. There's Expert/Creator/Modular sets from 20 years ago that sell for $500-1000 _opened and pre-built/re-disassembled_. That's all brand power.

So they're less about $/brick (though i know people scrutinize it) and more about price point and brand. Phrased differently, having your brick company race to the bottom sounds like a losing strategy.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#162

Post by bityard »

scatbot wrote: post #12

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 s…

I'm not a Lego nerd, but I recently saw a really sweet Lego DeLorean in Walmart priced at almost $200. Now that I have disposable income, I would have impulse-purchased that thing so hard if it would have been closer to $100. But I can't quite bring myself to part with a pair of benji's for a plastic toy, no matter how thoroughly it triggers my nostalgia.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#163

Post by jdwithit »

brazzy wrote: post #92
mmustapic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lego was always expensive, you can compare prices adjusted for inflation. For example, the 1979 Galaxy Explorer https://brickset.com/sets/497-1 > was around $32, that's $144 today. The reimagined set from 2023 https://brickset.com/sets/10497-1 > was sold at $99, $106 today. Not only it is cheaper, but much larger and with many more pieces.

It has almost 4 times the number of pieces, but is only about 50% longer and wider - there's just way more smaller pieces. Price per piece is very misleading when comparing older and newer sets. The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat". Which is not that great for creative play.

Definitely agree on the reduced usefulness for creative play. My kids got a lot of Lego sets as gifts when they were younger. Which is great, I love them playing with Legos. But once they're done with the instructions that's just kinda it. A Star Wars or Frozen or Minecraft themed kit ends up being all weird one-off specialty pieces. They are necessary to make an extremely detailed replica of the Millenium Falcon. But they have no place if you just want to grab a handful of bricks and start building whatever your imagination comes up with. We have a tub full of thousands of pieces and it never gets used. I think it's a bummer that they've pivoted to pushing these intricate $120 kits to adults rather than designs featuring more reusable components. You need to go out of your way to buy tranches of generic bricks if you want to have free play.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#164

Post by tracker1 »

scatbot wrote: post #12

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 s…

I feel the same... I remember as a kid, being able to get kits of hundreds of just random blocks and variations and just being able to build/play... all the sets today are all custom blocks that just constrain you and often aren't significantly reusable while I'm not sure that I've even seen basic block kits anywhere in decades now.

edit: I know you can get thousands piece brick sets from third parties or random bulk set sales on Amazon... the issue is the random bits are from the current sets mostly with little reuse value, and the bricks sets are from third parties of questionable tolerance compared to real lego. I just want to be able to get a classic 1000-3000 piece set of classic bricks/pieces from Lego proper, even if it's $100-200 total, still way more than 3rd party but maybe not the same margins for Lego as the bespoke sets.

edit2: there are some "Lego Classic" sets that are closer to what I would like to see, this is probably the closest.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5FMF8BF/

But even then, maybe need that many more bricks that are just bricks... again, there are third party sets that are all block variants that are much bigger/cheaper... would just be nice to be able to get more of those without paying an arm and a leg.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#165

Post by detourdog »

scatbot wrote: post #12

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 s…

I got my first Lego set in the early 70’s through a Velveeta cheese mail in promotion. The company almost went out of business in the early 90’s before they discovered movie tie-ins. I believe the quality of play was lost in this transition because the sets became more literal and less open ended. My first big set was a fire station which certainly literal but somehow seems more open ended then the movie tie/in sets.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#166

Post by adamzwasserman »

butILoveLife wrote: post #10

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 se…

The reason this is impressive has less to do with the tolerances themselves and more to do with backward compatibility across decades at scale. That's the genuinely hard part.

The history here is deeper than most people realize. The United States spent fifty years (roughly 1800 to 1853) at the Springfield and Harper's Ferry armories trying to achieve what LEGO now does routinely: parts manufactured to tight enough tolerances that they are truly interchangeable without fitting. In 1853, a visiting British inspector randomly selected ten muskets made in ten different years, disassembled them, mixed the parts, and reassembled ten functional muskets using only a screwdriver. Tolerances of a thousandth of an inch. It was considered impossible by most of the engineering establishment of the time.

The way they got there was by building machines, then using the parts those machines made to build better machines, then using those improved parts to build even better machines. A virtuous circle of transferring skill from human hands to tooling. This is the actual origin story of what historians call the American System of Manufacture, and it's the foundation the entire modern automotive supply chain sits on.

So yes, any competent injection molder holds tight tolerances today. But that's precisely the point: the reason it seems unremarkable now is that two centuries of compounding precision made it so

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#167

Post by georgefrowny »

awkward wrote: post #28
scatbot wrote: post #12

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 s…

The decline of technic sets is such a shame. There's so little support for anything but representative models of specific cars, despite the platform being able to support a ton of mechanical creativity.

The disappearance of real metal Meccano is really crazy. I know metal is expensive, but also bulk processing of it has never been cheaper or faster.

It's also a shame because it's really good for mechanical rapid prototyping and you can bend and cut it in a pinch and it stays put. But buying vintage Meccano to abuse like that is expensive and feels like a war crime.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#168

Post by detourdog »

mmustapic wrote: post #62
scatbot wrote: post #12

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 s…

Lego was always expensive, you can compare prices adjusted for inflation. For example, the 1979 Galaxy Explorer https://brickset.com/sets/497-1 > was around $32, that's $144 today. The reimagined set from 2023 https://brickset.com/sets/10497-1 > was sold at $99, $106 today. Not only it is cheaper, but much larger and with many more pieces.

I remember the Lego 404 set being $40 in 1980. I actually can’t believe my Mom bought it for me.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#169

Post by skrebbel »

Thlom wrote: post #46
wek wrote: post #18

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 :)

You can still buy LEGO Classic which is just a bunch of bricks.

Not really. Even LEGO Classic has way too many different colors (and only a few bricks of each), and too many weird shapes. Even if you buy a lot of it, it's hard to make your own designs that actually look nice (as in, not having that one incorrectly-colored brick in that one place, and so on).

I for the love of God can't comprehend why LEGO Classic has 4 shades of blue. It makes everything worse.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#170

Post by yonatan8070 »

vidarh wrote: post #6

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 l…

IIRC there's also light yellow pins that are also light friction
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