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.

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...

Pretty sure this is false. Old bricks had way higher clutch power, so high that it was deemed too difficult to separate. Sometime in the 90's the grip strength was reduced.

This false claim is underpins the entire article :(

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_phantom

This is just manifestly NOT TRUE. The outward appearance may be the same. There were intentional improvements to the walls and tubes that make fit less than perfect. Generally, today's brick requires less force to snap and un-snap, because the compression is focused onto fewer points. (I guess this lowers the "hoop strength".)

Older bricks can be either: completely loose, or clutch so hard to each other they are the devil to take apart.

I have many bricks from 1962 onwards. The oldest 2x4s and 2x2s were made of cellulose acetate (CA) (in North America, intermediated by Samsonite.) CA were softer, and either had less clutch power to begin with, or lost it over time. When I got them in the 70s, they fit but wouldn't reliably stick to each other, nor later 70s-80s bricks (all ABS plastic by then.) (CA bricks were mostly red, and they have a pale orange tint.)

70s-80s bricks did not always age well. Aged 1x4 or 1x8 bricks can have the outer wall bowed inward slightly. This is a mold engineering problem anyway. Later, 80s bricks were improved by slightly thinner walls and some reinforcing tabs. The older, aged bricks can stick brutally to each other and to newer bricks.

The 10x10 baseplates didn't age well (these were once box-tops! Tog'l Toys also had the baseplate as a box-lid.) Possibly made of polycarbonate (PC). Other large plates in ABS-- for instance 6x16 (Auto Chassis, red) -- have warped. They were also more brittle to begin with.

So inside Brick geometry has changed over the decades. 60s-70s bricks are closer to plain boxes with tubes inside - as the Kiddicraft prototype of the 50s. In the 80s, the outer walls got thinner and had tiny studs where the studs contacted the wall. And the tubes changed from cylinders to just slightly clover-leaf inside, so that a tube over a single stud now formed 4 points of contact, and came apart with lower shear force. (I believe this also made it easier to pry a plate off of a larger plate.)

I have Fabuland sets from early 80s, whose plain bricks are so stiff, they are positively brutal to snap onto each other or 90s bricks.

The brick geometry of today is much improved. And the ABS is more "plastic", perhaps more "B" (butadiene rubber) or less "S" (styrene): I can drill it more cleanly.

Mid 80s and 90s bricks will interoperate just fine with today's. But bricks from before that period didn't age so well (and their corners, I believe, used to be harder.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

My recent experience calls bs on pulling them apart.

Legos don’t have draft.

That means nothing to 99% of you, but someone else here must understand what the implications of that are for releasing from molds at a mass scale.