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 LEGO Company / 2178
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Subject: 
Re: Quality issue - update
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.lego, lugnet.color, lugnet.general
Date: 
Tue, 6 Jul 2004 00:25:03 GMT
Viewed: 
5308 times
  
In lugnet.lego, Scott Arthur wrote:
   In lugnet.lego, Ross Crawford wrote:
   In lugnet.lego, Mark Bellis wrote:
   I believe that over the years the tolerance has been widened, with the aim of reducing production cost.

OK so I just went to my box of childhood LEGO (circa 1970-80) to check this out. Discounting the CA bricks which have known deterioration problems, I put together 4 stacks of 10 ABS bricks, 2 red and 2 white. I made sure I picked out the “best looking” ones to avoid damaged edges etc which may have had an effect. I noted 2 things:
  1. Several of the bricks had significantly less “clutch power”, though obviously this could also be from deterioration;
  2. The stacks ranged from 95.9 to 96.6 mm. It would be interesting to know if the brick tolerance is +/- 0.1 or 0.3 mm, either way they were all inside it. But there was still significant difference even with these old bricks.
So I would invite others who think the tolerance has widened to do similar tests on older bricks to back up their claim.

If exact brick size variation tends towards(1) a normal distribution there will be equal numbers of oversized and undersized bricks. Measuring the length of a “stack” of bricks will basically cancel out any error.

Agreed, with a large enough sample size. I hardly think 10 bricks (or even 40) would be enough to cancel out all such errors. Besides, if my stacks reduced the error, doesn’t that mean the older bricks are actually likely to have worse tolerance than I found? Which supports my argument that tolerances *haven’t* widened over the years.

ROSCO



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Quality issue - update
 
(...) You are correct; I should have worded that a little better. ;) Scott A (who thinks this would make a good high school sats project) (...) (20 years ago, 6-Jul-04, to lugnet.lego, lugnet.color, lugnet.general, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Quality issue - update
 
(...) If exact brick size variation tends towards(1) a normal distribution there will be equal numbers of oversized and undersized bricks. Measuring the length of a “stack” of bricks will basically cancel out any error. Scott A (1) I say “tends (...) (20 years ago, 5-Jul-04, to lugnet.lego, lugnet.color, lugnet.general, FTX)

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