Subject:
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Re: LEGO Quality Control
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.ambassadors
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Date:
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Thu, 4 Sep 2008 22:34:51 GMT
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Viewed:
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17763 times
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Perfection with anything that has to do with color is simply not possible,
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It is if you’re dealing with black.
Black trumps everything, at least in ABS.
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Actually it really does not. I have polished literally thousands of black bricks
and when one brings the to a high polish variations are very evident to me. One
can tell which have red or blue or green regrind in them. It is true that black
does mask --but only if mixing with dark colors. At the Inside Tour that is
exactly what they said they did with much of their regrind--put it back into the
black and add enough to mask it. But there is actually another problem with this
approach. The Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green pigments are on an order of 10 times
more expensive than black.At least in the paint pigment market. And I am sure
the same in ABS as they use the same pigments. Especially lead free pigments.
It is actually much more economical to reuse red and those expensive colors back
into red than wasting it into the black. Years ago, for example dry toluidine
red was on the order of $10/lb--the color to make pure Coke red- whereas carbon
black was on the order of 50 cents to 1.00/lb depending on the grade.And one did
not have to use much black poundage wise to achieve hiding. One would never
waste say off color red paint into black but would use its tinting strength to
augment or at least not detract from another batch of red, orange or clear
brown. Of course we also then “finished off” each and every batch making slight
modifications to bring it up to standard before packaging. Something I am not
sure can be done in a contiuous manufacturing scenario.
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The pigment they use for black ABS is carbon, which is strong enough to
overpower every color you might throw in for regrind (provided you don’t
throw in too much off-color regrind, that is, or you actually could get color
streaks). In the case of a rarely-used color that they have trouble keeping
consistent, my first suggestion would be to suck up the cost difference and
recycle the special regrind into black bricks.
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The obvious choice was black, because all that anyone had
to do was make sure that it was sufficiently mixed in with the black regrind.
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It would seem that you would also have to increase the amount of black pigment
to overcome the white that would make it grey.
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I believe we later experimented with having our extruder recycle it into OSHA
yellow and OSHA orange sheet, since their system was supposed to be
sophisticated enough to compensate for the difference (and we could afford to
have some noticable variation in color from one batch to the next.
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That is really making a better use of the expensive white color for TiO2 is not
cheap.
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unlike
The LEGO Company). Thing is, for all the slight variation we had with
yellow, orange, and even sometimes with white (like white LEGO bricks, our
white stock would yellow with age). There was never any variation in the
black sheet,
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I bet there was if one looked closely. The eye can discern over 10,000 shades of
black and still call it black.
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and we used a lot more of that than all other colors combined.
I would especially urge that they consider this possibility if it would
straighten things out enough that they could repeal this alleged ban on
purple parts.
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As I said, they said at the factory in Billund that that is exactly what they
did with a lot of their dark regrind--dumped into black and overwelmed it.
I still contend except for blatant lapses, that LEGO does a pretty outstanding
job considering their enormity. Not nearly as good as a small shop paint
manufacture can obtain--but we are talking toys here--not automotive and
decorative finishes. We could always take business away from the big paint
companies because our constistency was so much better--because of lower volume
and higher personal attention.
It is an interesting topic. And the in this particualar industry, there is as
much an art to producing consistancy it as there is science, engineering, and
technology.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: LEGO Quality Control
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| (...) Yes, that was what they announced sometime in the past couple years. I can't remember when the change took place, but I do know that they had inconsistent shading in the dark-purple bricks that they used to make the Knight Bus in 2004. There (...) (16 years ago, 4-Sep-08, to lugnet.ambassadors, FTX)
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