Subject:
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Re: LEGO's Worst Mistake Ever!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.lego, lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 16 Mar 2004 20:07:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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13875 times
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In lugnet.lego, James Wilson wrote:
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Great conspiracy theory, but I think it would be too difficult in practice to
get the same amount of each color in each batch of recycled ABS - otherwise
you’d have variation in the new colors from batch to batch.
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It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Well, assuming your recycled material
maintains a consistent color (clearly, that’s not happening). Plastic colors
are minutely fine-tuned, so as long as you know the specific color of the batch
(a lot less difficult for LEGO bricks than the wide variety that might be seen
at an extrusion shop), and the weight of the total batch, you can plug those
numbers into an equation to figure out exactly how much of what colors to add to
the recycled material to make it match the color that you intend to recycle
into. Except black. That’s a lot simpler. Just add a bunch of carbon and call
it good. You’ll never see the old color through the black, and carbon has a
very consistent look.
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Oh, wait, haven’t we seen that in the purple in the Knight Bus?! You may be
on to something!
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If cross-color recycling is the heart of this problem, as they actually get
experience in doing so (assuming they realize there’s a problem), it should help
narrow the band of color variation, but it might never go away completely until
they figure out that the combination of replacement colors and inconsistent
colors is seriously hurting them. Truthfully, with the advances that have been
made in mold design (such as sprueless tooling), and the claims on how few parts
get rejected, there shouldn’t be a huge amount of material that actually needs
to get recycled. Unfortunately, the bulk of what there is will probably be the
flame-colored bricks that happen between color batches, which not only is
impossible to determine exactly how much of each color is involved, but it’s
also a lot harder to find a suitable color to recycle it into. Black is the
goto color, but there’s a limit to how much recycled plastic you can use before
the product gets brittle enough to crack under stress, and the molecular chains
in injection molded plastic are already shorter than they are for extruded
plastic, so you need to keep the recycled content lower than you would for
something that’s going to be sheet-formed, like the thin baseplates.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: LEGO's Worst Mistake Ever!
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| Great conspiracy theory, but I think it would be too difficult in practice to get the same amount of each color in each batch of recycled ABS - otherwise you'd have variation in the new colors from batch to batch. Oh, wait, haven't we seen that in (...) (20 years ago, 16-Mar-04, to lugnet.lego, lugnet.general, FTX)
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