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BusinessWeek has a great slideshow and article on how LEGOs are made -
"Compared to the high-tech toys of today, LEGO bricks look exceedingly simple. But their precise production process is nothing to scoff at. Each LEGO brick must have that perfect grasp -- strong enough to hold onto another brick but easy enough for a child to pull apart. The production of LEGO bricks is so accurate that only 18 out of 1 million LEGO elements produced is considered defective. It's an astonishing number, considering that 15 billion LEGO components are made every year. We take a look at how classic LEGO bricks are made." [via] - Link & article.
Here's a fun LEGO factoid -
LEGO Group is producing 15 billion components a year--that's 1.7 million items an hour, or 28,500 a minute. Tire production accounts for some of that number; the factory also produces 306 million tiny rubber tires a year. In fact, going by that number, LEGO is the world's No. 1 tire manufacturer.
Related:
- LEGO Technic Difference Engine - Link.
- LEGO Flash drive - Link.
- Stargate: LEGO - Link.
- LEGO PC - Link.
- LEGO orrery - Link.
- LEGO Harpsichord - Link.
- HOW TO make a medium format pinhole LEGO camera - Link.
- Color scanning LEGO music machine - Link.
- LEGO archives @ MAKE - Link.
From the pages of MAKE:
- Blockheads - LEGO: the ultimate prototyping material. MAKE 02 - Page 38. Subscribers--read this article now in your digital edition!
1 in 55 thousand failure rate, so 1 failure every 2 minutes of production, not what I would call a high quality manufacturing system, get that up to 1 in 500 thousand and your getting somewhere.
but I want to know how many failures are boxed, miscounted pieces, wrong but similar sizes, etc, etc
basically failures to the consumer
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1 in 55,000? That's incredibly good. I bet you couldn't make three the same out of ten if you tried to copy a brick. Compared to silicon (well, GaAs) chip production it is impossibly good. They get a ten percent failure rate!
That they can check 27,500 parts every minute (and that they even bother - many cheap manufacturers don't seem to bother these days) is also very impressive.
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>>but I want to know how many failures are boxed, miscounted pieces, wrong but similar sizes, etc, etc
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theres a substantial difference between injection molding and silicon chips
a failure rate of 1 in 55k in automated injection molding is horrible, although in manual injection molding its a miracle number.
I used to program Engel injection molding machines for a plastic dish company in Toledo, and a failure rate worse than 1 in 300k had them running diagnostics and calling maintenance personnel, with a new mold it was usually up in 1 in 600k defect rate, their sister company apparently had a utensil molding process with a failure rate of less than 1 per million, at least their tech touted that, but they also changed their molds frequently to reach that, more failures happened during packaging than manufacturing.
As for checking 27k pieces a minute, not that impressed, lot of ways to automatically test parts before a person ever has to, optical recognition, stress/shear tests.
You want to be impressed, look at the QC process for Eggs.
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