Make-o Lego « Dvorak News Blog

chuck says:

6/15/2011 at 12:28 pm

And they use that machine to build this machine:

http://flickr.com/photos/si-mocs/5797622926/in/faves-daveexmachina/

Martin says:

6/15/2011 at 5:40 pm

Hard to believe this in of interest as most of the world realizes or would quickly know if they thought about, the parts are made from a standard infection molded process. Nothing exotic about how Legos are made…they cool toys to use, but makeing them is very straight forward on dedicates old technology. Have the stuff in the world is made with the same process.

chuck says:

6/15/2011 at 6:52 pm

To save time they should just dump 50% of it into the nearest landfill.

jpfitz says:

6/15/2011 at 7:16 pm

@Uncle Dave
Do you know where this Lego plant is?

#3 I found the video interesting. Not that I haven’t seen this type of manufacturing in person. But a lot of people have no idea how all these products around us are made.

AlanB says:

6/15/2011 at 7:18 pm

Notice there are no people. In the old days that factory would be teaming with workers who supported a thriving community. Now it just takes one man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to make sure the man keeps his hands off the machinery.

Skippy says:

6/15/2011 at 7:41 pm

#5 it’s in Billund, Denmark.

Derek says:

6/15/2011 at 8:16 pm

Actually, that plant (as well as the park) employs about 2800 people.

jpfitz says:

6/15/2011 at 8:25 pm

Thanks Skippy.

bobbo, the pragmatic libertarian Existentialist says:

6/15/2011 at 9:41 pm

I’d think the “leading edge” manufacturing video would be how to make your own lego and lego type bricks with your own 3-D printer. If the cost of the raw materials to print your own stuff is cheap enough, I can see hours and hours spent doing stuff like that.

When I was a kiddie, before Lego, we had “red bricks” that did not snap together as much as they just sat on top of one another. I preferred them to lego–somehow they were a better fit for building model homes which is all I wanted to do.

“Print your own Products” with bittorrent designs ripped off the internet. Exciting.

Drive By Poster says:

6/15/2011 at 10:26 pm

You can’t make Lego bricks on a 3D printer as good as factory made Lego bricks (which use high pressure in the process to create durable plastics). It’s a matter of durability and keeping the “tightness” of the fittings.

3D printer bricks would be much more fragile and prone to losing the “tightness”. I recall a number of knock off brick systems as a kid that imitated Lego bricks, but they all sucked due to not having the “tightness” or durability of Lego bricks.

Germany apparently has their own take on the Lego concept, and reportedly it’s much more amenable to engineering projects than actual Legos. I saw a youtube video where somebody had made a curving monorail out of the German brick system.

I remember seeing a collection of replica buildings made of Legos in a local mall many years ago as a kid. Until then, I had no idea that Lego bricks came in colors other than white, yellow, red, and blue. Then I got pissed off over having been denied all those other colors because I didn’t live in Europe. 😀

bobbo, the pragmatic libertarian Existentialist says:

6/15/2011 at 10:45 pm

#11–Gee, Drive By==I’m kinda thinking the technology will keep changing and improving as in offering new materials that can be printed? Plastics, to metals, to drugs, to food, to organs? I see different articles about this all the time.

for some reason, it was that “hard snap” of Lego’s that I never liked. Bricks are bricks. Shouldn’t be able to build robots out of them. To each their own.