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In lugnet.color, David Eaton wrote:
> The color variations are probably the worst offenders, though. The differences
> in heights, etc, really don't seem that severe to me, although I can tell the
> difference when I'm looking for them. The color variants are bad though.
> Sometimes individual elements are darker on one side than on the other.
I believe I read somewhere that the ABS pellets are now transparent, and color
is injected during the moulding process? Whereas before, the pellets came
colored prior to being used. I could be wrong though.
But as for the color variations that people have been reporting over the past
few months, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the QA people DID realize they
had a large quantity of "less-than-ideal" parts. However, by the time they
discovered this, it was at a critical point of time in the year. It was either
"dump those parts and re-mould them, but disrupt their production cycle
severely" (i.e. lose even more money), or "use them in sets anyway, learn from
this mistake, and make sure it doesn't happen again".
It may be easy for us to make a decision, sitting in front of our computers, but
I bet the person(s) in charge thought long and hard about this before ultimately
going with the latter choice.
-Bryan
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In lugnet.color, Bryan Wong wrote:
> I believe I read somewhere that the ABS pellets are now transparent, and color
> is injected during the moulding process? Whereas before, the pellets came
> colored prior to being used. I could be wrong though.
>
> But as for the color variations that people have been reporting over the past
> few months, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the QA people DID realize they
> had a large quantity of "less-than-ideal" parts. However, by the time they
> discovered this, it was at a critical point of time in the year. It was either
> "dump those parts and re-mould them, but disrupt their production cycle
> severely" (i.e. lose even more money), or "use them in sets anyway, learn from
> this mistake, and make sure it doesn't happen again".
The keynote speech at Brickworld 2007 by Richard Stollery, the head of LEGO
community, contained these points and specifically mentioned the orange garbage
truck with pieces you could almost see thorough. They had the choice of not
producing a lot of sets or packaging sub-standard parts because there was not
enough time to redo the botched production runs. He stated these parts would
take about a year to flush out of the system. We first noticed them about 8
months ago so quality should get better about 4 months from now. Also stated was
the fact they are keeping a closer watch on QA to ensure this does not happen
again.
Doug
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