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...
Imho, this is, objectively, not true (anymore).
Pantasy with GoBricks are superior in coloring and fit; Cobi are excellent for things that should not be taken apart anymore (like tank models); Lumibricks are excellent in fit and have amazing illumination solutions that are lightyears (haha) ahead of lego.
Lego from my youth, which was a hand-me down at the time, doesn't fit well with new lego. So it might be 40 years old, (which seems like a long time until you actually reach that age!)
I think it's more likely do to plastic aging than the original tolerances though.
According to my local news outlet, they’re up 12% in revenue growth in the last year (which outpaces the rest of the toy industry) and up 1,200% since 2004.
EDIT: I think I also had some dark grey pins, but I don't remember if they were high or low friction
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.
Also to correct you, LEGO has been making most of the parts for decades, some have had changes due to new materials (which you can read upon online) but besides the ones that remained the same (not really), many new system elements got released in the last decades and new I.P tied elements get released on a yearly basis.
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.
This is one of those instances where it feels like people are terminally online. Or like the meme of the guy standing in the corner while everyone else is having fun at the party. You can find Legos being given away in a local buy-nothing group. It's still just as magical for kids as it ever was. These complaints are only from an adult who doesn't play with Legos. Who cares if sets become collectibles? Get other sets and have fun with Legos. These are toys that are meant to be played with. Play with them.
Adults collect them, true, but there are whole lines dedicated to them.
The Game Boy was much more affordable. Less whimsical, but brought back memories of taking apart electronics and marveling at what these circuit boards and components could possibly be doing.
- they have a finite production capacity
- they have a finite warehousing capacity
- there is a certain number of sets which will be bought
- crates of bricks without an established design have a limited appeal and while a consistent SKU, don't have the baked in demand a new set will have
Is it? It's not like it's hard to keep producing the pieces to the same original specifications. If they snapped then they snap now.
And then they sued the pants of everybody that tried to do the same thing to them.
Older sets had larger foundational and platform pieces which gave a good starting place for new creative builds.
Today, airplanes fuselages, wings, and car chassis are instead built up piece by piece.
It’s hard for my 6 year old to start creative builds that are stable when he hardly has any pieces larger than 2x6 across dozens of sets.
My wife found a huge mixed bin from the 80s and 90s at an estate sale. It really helped.
Well, people did complain about the whole 'special pieces' trend that you praise.
It's a little out of date, but the conclusions are still relevant.
Main things of note: Brickheads are pretty economical as a "parts pack" even with the IP licensing. No significant correlation between per-piece pricing and IP licensing (except for Star Wars). Star Wars and City sets are overpriced.
It has momentum because they haven’t let quality and innovation slide. They know customers will be out with pitchforks if quality drops.
This was all done planned and implemented by this one consulting guy (MCK?), who became CEO after delivering his report from his consulting company, Lego was near bankrupt back then - he started with all this subbranding shitty stuff and the "colorful" bricks and introduced all these many many "single-use-case-bricks" for more and more sets.
The two options would be that either the perception is unsubstantiated but persists, or there has been a continuous decline for the last 40 years. I'm strongly leaning towards the latter. I also having the same issues in the 00s looking at old sets from the 80s, and looking back now the 00s look much better than what we have today. Obviously not in every way, and not all recent sets were bad. But overall I have the feeling that there's been a steady trend that the bricks got better but the sets got worse
I haven't seen this push? The new Lego Smart stuff is explicitly "screen free play". There is an app but it's just for firmware update and configuration and you can't even connect it unless the brick is on the charger.
I must say, the new smart bricks with all sorts of sensors(color, gyro, distance etc) triggers the inner child in me. I can’t wait to get them for my kiddo and teach him how that magic actually works beneath.
The regular LEGO at this points feels “just plastic” and I won’t feel bad offloading that purchase to AliExpress.
Let me add this: 4. no spare parts available. So when I break weird Chinese invention the whole set becomes useless without that very special part. It happened few times and I got back to used Lego sets.
That compulsion doesn't seem present in freeform building, and there's been zero interest in it in our household. I know that's not true for all, but it seems like a lost art. Maybe it's because the IP sets show how but not the why it's constructed in a certain way, so given a bag of Lego most wouldn't know the process of creating something they can see in their minds eye within the constraints of the available bricks.
> 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.
Lego does indeed have very tight tolerance, but I don't know if the numbers are in the public domain.
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.
Normal_gaussian•1h ago
My recent experience calls bs on pulling them apart.
intrasight•1h ago
doubled112•1h ago
What I don't remember was every kit being made up of so many small, weird pieces.
ralferoo•46m ago
Apart from those Star Wars kits, everything I had were generic blocks and strips (not sure what they're called, the ones that are 1/3 the height of a block) and some different designs of people. The closest I had to previous special sets was a town thing that my brother and sister had before me (they were 10 years older), which was a bunch of large floor tiles with roads and grassy areas with studs, some flowers pieces (single stud) and a handful of special buildings. But they were designed to be relatively generic, and the fun was using those building blocks to make a new city each time, not trying to recreate exactly someone's model. Apart from the flowers and the men, basically everything was a standard part, except perhaps a different colour.
When I was a teenager, the trend had become sets with lots of specialised parts for one specific model, such that they didn't really make sense as generic pieces. I enjoyed the technics kits because the early ones were just generic building blocks (apart from the wheels and rack and pinion, but again they could be re-used in lots of subsequent designs), but more and more the kits in the shops were for specialised models with unique pieces that were never designed to fit aesthetically with anything other than the model they came with. I'm sure _some_ people built other things with them, but equally I'd bet than probably 90% of those kits were built exactly once following the instructions and then never disassembled again.
bena•28m ago
Lego did not have Star Wars sets until 1998. The original Lego Millenium Falcon set 4504 would have retailed for right around $100. Which was high, but just as high as the bigger Castle sets at the time.
Zanfa•25m ago
[1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...