Subject:
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Re: Damaged MINT Lego?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Mon, 1 May 2000 13:07:47 GMT
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Viewed:
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913 times
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Xcalabur wrote:
>
> In lugnet.general, Shiri Dori writes:
> > In lugnet.general, Chris Maddison writes:
> > > Aye, there's a couple times I've opened a set and found faulty or missing
> > > parts. One time, a factory fault was my gain. I bought a Snowspeeder, and
> > > somehow during manufacturing, two 1x3 orange slopes got stuck together. Not
> > > glue; melted plastic. So, there was one extra slope. This was easily
> > > remedied with an Xacto knife to seperate the pieces.
> >
> > That's interesting! I was under the impression that TLC uses box weight
> > to "eliminate" factory errors; thus sometimes (rarely, but still) people would
> > get a wrong-colored piece, but not very often a different piece altogether. I
> > wonder how an extra slope snuck past the box weight test?
> >
> > -Shiri
>
> No clue. This could also be why we get "extras" with certain sets. Along
> these same lines, I wonder exactly how they divvy up pieces for each set, and
> decide what goes in what bag. For example, I have 4 Catapult Crushers, and no
> two of them had the same pieces in the same bags. They were kind of mixed and
> matched. Makes you wonder...
The weight control is somewhat of a statistical thing. Any time you take
a measurement of something, given a sufficiently precise (as in digits
of precision as opposed to accuracy) measurement device, you will get
different measurements each time. These measurements will of course fall
on a bell curve, with most of them occuring within some range of error
(the typical X plus or minus Y is a way of specifying this error - Y is
one standard deviation).
If the error tolerance is sufficiently below the weight of a single
item, then you can practically guarantee that if the weight comes out in
range, that you have the correct number of items. If the error tolerance
is close to the weight of an item, you can no longer guarantee that you
will have the correct number of items. If the cost of the item is small
enough, the best solution is to put an extra item in. Now most people
get an extra item, a few people might get two extra items, and a few
people might get the correct number of items (and very rarely someone
will not get enough, or someone will get 3 or more extra items).
Looking at the results of TLC packaging, I would assume that the error
tolerance is considerably less than the weight of a 1x1 round plate. I
would guess that a 1x1 round plate may weight 2 or even 3 times the
error tolerance. If this is the case more than 90% of the packages will
have exactly one extra plate.
When a mispacked bag gets through, there are several possibilities:
- machine is only programmed to reject bags which weigh less than the
correct amount
- malfunctioning machine
- bag was rejected, and an operator examined it by hand and determined
it was ok
- bag may have fell off the conveyor, and an operator put it back on the
conveyor after the scale
Other problems which can result in an inability to build the set would
be:
- damaged parts (part may escape visual inspection, damage may occur
after the visual inspection stage)
- malformed part (has anyone seen this in a LEGO set? I have seen Mega
Bloks sets with malformed parts, but never a LEGO set)
- wrong color part (packing machine was not totally emptied of a
previous set's pieces so the first few bags for the new set get the
wrong part, but it weighs the same, bag contains the same part in two or
more colors and visual inspection fails to catch the problem)
- different part altogether
- missing bag of parts or wrong bag of parts (these last two are going
to be very rare as weighing the box and visual inspection before the box
is sealed should be very effective in eliminating this problem)
One result of the quality control is that there is a significant
probability that if an error slips through, it will be replicated in a
large number of sets because the cause of the error is mis-programming
of the line (all the way to the point of whatever is used to tell the
visual inspectors what to look for is wrong). The recent example with a
ZNAP box packed with the contents of another set is a good one. Probably
what happened is that the step where the components are put in the box
was misprogrammed with the wrong set number (note that this
misprogramming may not be a machine program, but a human program - i.e.
the boxing operator may have been told set X was what is being run
today, but in actuality set Y is being run). If the error is not caught
before the sets are packed into shipping boxes, and put on a pallet, it
may be close to impossible to ferret out all the mispacked boxes.
The only time I have ever seen a serious problem like this was in
college when I bought a box of Lucky Charms. When I went to have
breakfast the next day, I discovered there were about 10 marshmallows
for the whole box. I went back to the store an got another box, and
found it was bad also. I forget if at that point I gave up on getting a
box of Lucky Charms, and I even had difficulty convincing the store
clerk that it was a problem the first time, and a serious problem the
second time.
--
Frank Filz
-----------------------------
Work: mailto:ffilz@us.ibm.com (business only please)
Home: mailto:ffilz@mindspring.com
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Damaged MINT Lego?
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| (...) Yes - many of the 4291 red tubs had malformed red lattice fences in: there was a gap in the lattice at the same point on every malformed one that I got, so it was probably a mould problem. I had 4 or 5 out of 13 tubs with this problem, and I (...) (25 years ago, 1-May-00, to lugnet.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Damaged MINT Lego?
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| (...) No clue. This could also be why we get "extras" with certain sets. Along these same lines, I wonder exactly how they divvy up pieces for each set, and decide what goes in what bag. For example, I have 4 Catapult Crushers, and no two of them (...) (25 years ago, 29-Apr-00, to lugnet.general)
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