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

thewave.engineer

231–240 of 343 posts

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

#231
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…

Other manufacturers give LEGO a run for their money nowadays. Look at the CaDA Mercedes-AMG One for example.

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

#232
post #76

This is why Lego has nothing to fear from 3D printing.

The trick is to redesign the bricks for worse tolerances. With 3D printers you can print very nuanced springy elements that are impossible to achieve with injection molding. I got some reasonable bricks years ago on cheap printers with PETG, should work even better now with modern printers and ABS.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic, but: > My kids have a photographic memory How do you know it is photographic memory? More than one of your kids have it? Do you know why or what may have contributed to its development?

> My kids have a photographic memory of each of those special pieces and which set they came from. Read the whole sentence- this is clearly an informal use of 'photographic memory' to indicate that his kids are really into Lego and keep track of details in the way only kids can.

That is what I was thought, but I thought I was wrong.

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

#234

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.

I guess if a single cavity mold costs $30,000 and a 16 cavity mold costs $110,000 you have an additional expense of ~$80,000, divided over half million parts is 16 cents. So lets say somewhere from 5-10cents per part to go 16x faster. My numbers might be off a bit but seems in the ballpark. I also don't know much a lego brick costs to make in terms of materials/opex.

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

#235
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Exp…

Yeah I don't know what this person is on about. Lego is obviously premium and ... charges premium prices because ... they're a business. People (consumers) who want premium products ... pay the premium. I would be much more frustrated if they became cheaper and reduced the quality of the product.

There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at (but not lower or you are dumping.) A Marxist view of economy, if I must.

Whenever I meet one of these people, I ask if they are willing to negotiate a wage reduction with his HR. My logic is simple. If you think it is wrong for a business to sell a product at the maximum price they can demonstrably get away with like Lego does, then why is it right for you, a professional worker selling your labor, to sell your labor at a price higher than what is necessary for subsistence?

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

#236
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a set recently which was definitely padding its piece counts. The interior structure of a solid shape was constructed out of dozens of small 1x2s and could easily have been a handful of much larger pieces with no downside. I didn't consider the "more pieces = more perceived value" logic until this comment.

For a while the complaint was that Lego was making too many big, specialized pieces, so I'm amused that the current complaint seems to be that they're using too many small generic ones.

They're not saying that they should be using big specialized pieces, they're saying that they should be using bigger boring standard pieces.

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

#237
Upvoted, and the English prose is pretty good in spelling and grammar, but the metric units in the writing need improvement.

> 10 microns

"Micron(s)" is a deprecated word since 1967 and "micrometre(s)" must be used instead. The reason is that it is a non-standard word; if "micron" is accepted, then we should also accept the nonsensical words "millin", "nanon", "kilon", etc. The metric system is supposed to be easy to learn with consistent rules and as few special cases as possible.

> 4.8mm ... 0.01mm ... "0.002mm tolerance"

These numbers are correct, but it's harder to quickly skim the text and make comparisons because the number of decimal places vary. It would be better to write 4.800 mm, 0.010 mm, 0.002 mm to make the reader's job easier. Or convert everything to whole micrometres, like 4800 μm, 10 μm, 2 μm.

> withstand over 4,000 Newtons

Almost correct, but the unit must be decapitalized to "newtons". This is similar to how other name-based units are decapitalized - like "100-watt light bulb", "12 amps", "3 gigahertz".

> 2-3 Newton insertion force

It must be written as "2–3 newtons". When the unit name is written out in full, it follows normal English pluralization rules (e.g. metres, seconds, volts, pascals, kelvins, ohms, teslas). The only exceptions are hertz and siemens, because they already end with -s or -z.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is the thing about raising a kid these days. Those damn machines have replaced so much… because yeah Minecraft is like a souped up version of Lego where in creative mode you have every part you need. And you don’t have to dig for it or anything. And it has survival mode and a whole huge thing on top of that. It’s so difficult to know the boundaries. People from older generations giving advice about screen ti…

> completely uncharted water Good thing with analogue toys like legos is you know your kid is playing with legos that is wiring X brain cells for Y skills, even if Y skills are deprecated in digital world. It's hard to say with current gen, there's screen time to try to shape behavior, there are occasional kids who are tech literate maestros which every generation has, but plenty of kids who rely on LLMs, can only fi…

Without a tangible feedback you won't get any digital skills for spatial memory and coordination, peiod.

And the kids you mention can barely understand files, filesystems and don't even mention them about O(n) notation. If any, these kids doing the jobs of 1000s of engineers are proportionally worse than the average secretary skills in the 80's.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying buckets of used bricks is pretty cheap, too. I bought an adult's old lifetime collection for $30 CAD. My 2 year old son and I are still sorting them.

Sorting Lego is such a pain in the ass. I have like a huge stash from when I was a kid. Back then we just had it all in a few tubs and dug to find a part. But somehow now I feel I must sort them… but the “right way” is ill defined and kind of sucks the joy out of playing (especially disassembling) And there is no “right way” that I’ve even found. Sort by color and now the little pieces fall to the bottom and are hard…

The evolution of lego sorting [2001]

https://news.lugnet.com/storage/?n=707

(Bah Might as well submit that as a top level story, others may enjoy it)

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

#240
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still buy basic brick sets. With lot of nice color nowadays. Like the CLassics or Creator lines: https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/classic And for $100 you get a lot of bricks to play with and let your imagination go wild. Just don't buy sets aimed at adults and IP fansumers.

The point is: when I was a kid, all Lego sets consisted almost completely of general bricks. You could, and would, start building different things from the moment you got your first set, and the possibilities would increase exponentially once you got a few more sets. Any set contributed to your collection of building blocks to create new things.

I don’t think this is true at all. What do you mean by “general bricks”? If anything there is more brick-built stuff nowadays.

For example the Creator 3-in-1 Castle (which I got for my son for Christmas) is pretty similar to castle sets I had as a child but basically way better and with brick built horses rather than large mould ones

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