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How They Make LEGO Bricks
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Nov 29, 2006 09:19 AM
from the mana-from-heaven dept.
from the mana-from-heaven dept.
harajukboy writes "Businessweek.com shows us how the famous LEGO bricks are made. Among the new facts I picked up was that LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world, and that the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective." I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
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Still Not Six Sigma (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still Not Six Sigma (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who is an expert: What has six sigma added to this paradigm?
Re:Still Not Six Sigma (Score:5, Interesting)
Bureaucracy.
At least in GE's implementation of Six Sigma. They found a way to take what is essentially the engineering version of the scientific process, wrap it in so much red tape that it is unworkable (a 12-step process that really had 15 steps) , and put it in the hands of every worker in the company. Originally they gave bonuses for doing it, but eventually they took those away and declared "Thou shalt not get a raise without a Six Sigma Project." What ended up happening is that people refused to make any process or product improvements unless they were part of somebody's (preferably their own) Six Sigma project.
It was ridiculous. You ended up with one person optimizing a part of a process, while the person in the next cubicle was eliminating the entire process in favor of a more unwieldy one. Then, six months later, somebody else would start a new project that essentially put the original process back in place. Of course the problem was that they were using a distinctly product-oriented procedure, and trying to use it to solve process problems.
Don't even get me started on the math. They would assume normal distributions for everything. Never mind that one of the steps was to prove normalcy. If that test proved it wasn't normal, you were instructed by your "Black Belt" to assume normalcy anyway -- even if a Weibull distribution was clearly the correct choice (like in timed exercises). Idiots, I say. And then they had PHB's (called "Black Belts" and "Master Black Belts") trying to tell engineers how to do math, when they didn't even know how to use a simple Q test. If they saw a data point that didn't support their theory, they just called it an outlier, and deleted it.
You'd think after nearly two years of not working at GE, I wouldn't get so wound up about it. I guess as an engineer, it really gets my goat when people use math improperly.
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Re:Translation (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Still Not Six Sigma (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still Not Six Sigma (Score:4, Interesting)
Or probably not. They have much lower yield rates because their processes are constantly shrinking, often to double the number transistors in a given area every year and a half. I read there's an adage in the DRAM industry that too high of a yield is bad because it means there's capacity potential not being properly exploited. If they didn't keep pushing much faster and much higher capacity products, I think they could do six sigma.
As others have noted, six-sigma has been a failure in business. You get reduced defect rates, but the cost in getting such a low defect rate is generally so exorbitantly expensive that you are better off recycling the rejects than spending the money to eliminate rejects. There's a similar joke about ISO90001 that you get half the defect rate because it cuts your productivity in half, or practically doubles the cost per part because of the beauracracy involved.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ... (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Still Not Six Sigma (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.lego.com/eng/service/replacementparts.a sp [lego.com]
Worked fantastic for the one bad part from Lego I have ever received. That ranges from
Re:Still Not Six Sigma (Score:4, Funny)
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Where do they all go (Score:5, Funny)
I think a recycle your Lego campaign should start and you should send all your old Lego to me.
This is not just a grab to make sure I have more Lego than you.
Re:Where do they all go (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Where do they all go (Score:5, Interesting)
I was able to view the slideshow. Nothing impressive, but nice pics.
this presentation [lego.com] is better, including short video clips of the machines in action. It's also more fun. Requires Flash, though.
same presentation without it opening in a popup window [popandco.com]
LEGO Factory in Enfield, CT (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, there's nothing particularly special about the production process. It's basic injection-molding. The plastic comes in bulk as small pellets, pre-dyed (I think, I'm a little fuzzy on this), and gets fed into machines that produce the bricks. I don't think that they make or dye the plastic on-site. The vast majority of the plant, as I remember it, was actually devoted to inspection, sorting/packing, and packaging for shipment. At the time this really surprised me; the "making stuff" part of the factory was far smaller than I had thought. It was cool to see them wheeling around big bins of bricks, though. (This was before they made quite as many special pieces as they seem to now.) I really should have brought a camera but never thought about it at the time. (I think I was probably in that period of life where I was trying hard not to show that I still thought Legos were really cool.) Somebody else visited and has a few photos here [geocities.com].
About the only thing I never worked out is how they get them to release from the molds so cleanly, and with such straight walls (normally to guarantee mold release you avoid straight walls and sharp edges/corners). On some bricks if you look closely though, you can see mold lines and sprues if you look in the bottom carefully.
It's sad to hear that they're closing the plant in CT; I had always hoped that maybe it was heavily automated enough to cope with the higher costs of labor in a high-cost area, but it seems not. I wonder what this leaves for industry in Connecticut these days? Without Lego, their principal exports are going to be nothing but a handful of helicopter parts and lawyers.
Re:LEGO Factory in Enfield, CT (Score:5, Informative)
The plastic shrinks as is cools. Simple as that.
Yes, I used to make plastic injection moulding tools. Well, that's a lie, I made the patterns that were used to cast the dies. A hammer wielding Toolmaker made the tools, obviously.
Tires (Score:4, Funny)
Yet, when making a car, you are hard-pressed to find four of the same set in a very huge bucket filled with Legos....
Yes, I play legos with my kids....
Why else? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I'd hope so. It's the best reason for having kids, really.
Relax (Score:4, Insightful)
How many times do we have to say it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How many times do we have to say it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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IANAL but I play one on Slashdot.
Re:How many times do we have to say it? (Score:5, Funny)
Like sheep. You can have a box of sheep, you can build things out of sheep bricks, but there are no such things as sheeps.
Re:How many times do we have to say it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How many times do we have to say it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh boy, I love it when people get nitpicky about things they don't know about. Whether we call them Legos, Lego, LEGOs or LEGO, we're legally wrong (and I do it all the time). The correct answer, as Susan Williams instructed us on the back of every instruction manual from the late 70s through 1987 (?) is to call them Lego brand building blocks. "Lego", it turns out, is the brand name, not the product. They're afraid of Tyco being able to call their products "MegaBlock brand lego blocks" and diluting their trademark like so many other companies [wikipedia.org].
Personally, I have a closet loaded with Legos. When my daughter graduates from Duplos, she'll get Legos. I'm not a lawyer, and I really don't care about trademarks enough to force that kind of burden onto children. My children will be taught that copyright and intellectual property law is there only to further the progress of art and science, not for the purpose of furthering jobs or corporate profits (although in any free market economy companies will be rewarded for meaninful progress of art and science). While I lean liberal in many beliefs, I'm fully aware of how limiting the US Constitution is with regard to intellectual property; it's very precise and quite limiting.
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I think that this is the number one failur
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Ouch (Score:5, Funny)
I bet they don't walk around with bare feet there.
Studies on developmental outcome? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has there been any research studying the effects of playing with Legos on mental development in children? It seems intuitive to me and probably others here that there is some positive correlation if not outright causality between these types of toys and intelligence.
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Re:Studies on developmental outcome? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Studies on developmental outcome? (Score:5, Funny)
Decline in quality? (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'm sure the machinery and manufacture process isn't changing, it would have been nice if the article could have commented on the changes being made in response to the restructuring LEGO has been doing the past couple years. It's pretty obvious to me that things are changing, but it'd be nice to have it documented.
Depends how long ago. (Score:3, Informative)
Tales from The LEGO Factory (Score:5, Informative)
Enfield is moving its manufacturing and packing to Mexico, that should be complete by March.
They'll be hoding an internal job fair sometime this winter - if you want some creative, dedicated folks, you'll find them there.
Our FIRST team was sponsored by LEGO for several years until 1998 - we were working in their machine shop and got to see a great deal of the facility.
Back around 1990 when the original LEGO TC Logo came out, we worked with them on a few projects.
They're an amazing bunch, from the shop techs to the engineers to the line staff to the model team (still based in Enfield).
There are bowls of LEGO on every conference table, not just for brand vanity, but for people to toy with as they discuss and solve problems. There's even an offshoot company, LEGO Serious Play that does corporate team training based on doing things with LEGO.
One of their points of pride is that as they increased automation, they only displaced workers to other areas of the factory, they (at least back then) never tossed someone out of the site as their existing job was automated.
In 1990 the packing lines were controlled by an amazing array of personal computers, Apple II, PC, I believe we even saw a few Commodores.
They since standardized. The machines also page the engineering staff when there's an issue with one, this replaces the sound and light alarm they used to have.
They've had two sorts of molding machines - one series that let the bricks and flashing fall through to sorters, and another where arms picked up the flashing and let the bricks drop. People touring would ask why some were robots (= had arms) and others weren't!
Some of the parts are assembled on the lines, most are simply picked, sorted and packed into those perforated bags. If you notice the tiny dot on a minfig head, that's where the high-contrast optical system aligns each minifig head to the body. It's very cool to see.
We had engineer/parents from other companies who used the same molding machines and could not believe the quality LEGO was getting - I believe their quoted tolerance was 3/1000 of an inch. Look for "gates" where the plastic entered the mold, or punches where the machine tapped the brick to free it - good luck finding either - then remember what your scale model kits looked like.
First time through, we saw pallettes of boxes from Bayer. When I asked the engineers what they were getting from Germany, the answer was ABS plastic. Yes, they were shipping raw plastic over here, they're very particular - no metals allowed whatsoever. One of their engineers managed a program to get plastics from GE in Pittsfield MA 50 miles up the road to do the same thing - the savings reportedly bought them about 7 years time here in CT.
There are no heaters per se in a LEGO molding machine - the pellets are fed through increasingly smaller feed tubes by arbors, and the pressure and friction creates the heat. When they hit the molds, the plastic is about the consistency of toothpaste. They have a rogues gallery of sculptures created by leaks.
They filled a 55 gallon drum every night with the bricks that get swept off the floor - we offered to help them get rid of those, but they recycle them - I believe to a comb company.
Our second year at FIRST, the robot was approximating an arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist. The ergonomics of the standard joysticks and buttons were a real challenge. So the team built a "waldo" out of LEGO, where the operator could lay their hand into it, and the robot would respond to the movements of the hand. All was well until the judges reminded us that LEGO was not in the kit of parts of alllowables list. They did offer us the chance to take our allowance of PVC pipe and moplding LEGO bricks out of that, and building the waldo out of them. The two LEGO engineers looked like someone just suggested they use Waterford crystal to haul horse manure. We
Injection moulding (Score:3, Interesting)
The details of what happens are cool, but every company making moulded thermoplastics does the same thing.
The machines at LEGO aren't any different than those making toothpaste caps or rubbermaid containers, it's just a cooler product to geeks.
and here with pretty moving pictures (Score:3, Informative)
i love this animation set.
Too Easy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, my daughter and I were making houses, cars and furniture with her LEGO bricks last night, and I commented to my wife that it was more fun when I was younger and the pieces were more generic. It feels like you're being coerced into building the specific sets on the box because the custom pieces aren't that good for much else, though you can come up with a really wacky-looking couch for your little lego people to sit on.
original LEGO US plant (Score:3, Interesting)
As kids, we all envied the children whose parents worked there because they'd come home with garbage bags of floor sweepings and those kids could build houses we could actually get inside. The local library had several models of famous houses/buildings that, again, were large enough to crawl into.
When I was a kid, we had to use our imagination (Score:3, Informative)
My step sons new Technic 8288 Mobile Crane [lego.com] and a bunch of the kits out now remind me more of the old Lego I remember.
Yeah the bricks are different.. most are just sticks with holes you link together but they open up new ways to build.
I remember the Technic 8860 [nd.edu] set I had as a kid.
It built a car with working suspension, steering, rear differential, a 2 speed shifting transmission, 4 cylinder engine with a crank and pistons that turned when the car moved.
Some of the stuff I see today is almost as cool as I remember that set was.
I gave what I had left to the kids.. over half the sets are missing but they still have fun with em.
Difficulty (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, that sounds difficult. Why didn't you use your hands?
Re:Fahrenhuh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fahrenhuh? (Score:5, Interesting)
574.5875 degrees Fahrenheit is exactly 574.5875 kelvin.
Re:915,103,765 different combinations (Score:5, Informative)