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In lugnet.general, David Zorn writes:
> Dave, I'm glad you raised this, but the clone brand experience cuts both ways.
>
> SETS AND PARTS
>
> It is only in the last year or 2 that one can say that the quality of the
> clone sets and parts has improved. Anyone familiar with the older MegaBlock
> sets (Western, Castle, Viking, Space Alien, Creature Seeker) would have to
> say that they were the *ultimate* in POOPs, BURPs, SPUDs, and every other
> kind of molded part one could think of. Buildings and vessels were one or
> two enormous POOP/SPUDs tacked together.
You're telling me that you can use a 16x8x8 western-style shack in your
space model? You're crazy! And that huge octagonal dome can be used in all
sorts of huge octagonal dome structures!
> Boxes of MB and BestLock do have different and unique parts, but they are
> often difficult to use in contexts other than the model that they came with
> or very similar applications.
This is generally true, but the same can be said of LEGO's juniorized
helicopter strut, car bases, and a host of others. That doesn't validate
MB's error, of course, but neither can MB be exclusively faulted (which
you're not doing, I know).
> QUALITY OF PLASTIC AND FIT
>
> > at least one of which has made
> > great strides in providing huge quantities of basic bricks at considerably
> > lower cost than LEGO. No, the quality isn't yet the same.
>
> One can get lots of cheap basic bricks from the MB sets now on the market.
> But IMO the quality of those bricks is so far below LEGO and the degree of
> variance in molding, color, finish and fit is so significant that it is
> difficult to use these for more than filling in around LEGO so that the MOC
> will hold together. And I have not seen *any* improvement in the quality of
> the plastic or the precision of production in MB over time.
This appears to be something of a litmus test for clone-lovers! I've been
buying MegaBloks since '94, and I can see marked improvement in this area,
as well as in color consistency. Not across themes, necessarily, but the
roughly 3000 grey 2x4 bricks culled from Battleships and Aircraft Carriers
have almost no discernable color variance.
For a long time I simply denied the clone quality issue, but I admit now
that I was not being objective. For me, and for other fans-of-the-clone,
the quality, while inferior, is good enough. I have had minimal trouble
with the strength of connection, and even if in the very long run clone
plastic won't hold up as well as LEGO ABS, it does just fine for me.
Richard Parsons' stupendous Carrier featured at
http://www.hinet.net.au/~rparsons/port/yar/welcome.htm
is the greatest example of what can be done with bricks of inferior quality.
To produce such a ship out of canonical LEGO would have run well into the
thousands of dollars. Apparently Richard (for whom I can't actually speak,
of course) has accepted the price/quality exchange as equitable.
> My children taught *themselves* to discern a MB brick from a LEGO brick
> because they were frustrated by trying to build with bricks that didn't hold
> together and where the color shade changes significantly from one to the
> next. Except for castle walls, noticeable color variations are unattractive
> and that's what you get from MB.
I'd like to pursue this particular point further. Are you seeing variance
between two like-colored bricks from the same set? That's unfortunate and
in direct contrast to my experience. I have seen difference between bricks
from different themes, but even among thousands of bricks from multiple
copies of the same set I find almost no variance. For me, if there's
variance among several themes, I'm not too upset, since I view it as an
opportunity to acquire a new hue of red.
> I gave a MB set to a child as a birthday gift, and he was totally
> turned off by the poorness of fit.
8^) I suggest you get that child some Ultra-Blox to show him what a truly
poor clone is!
> But, let's also face this, some silly books from the late 70s to the
> contrary, *quality is **not** free*. If you need/want quality for your sets
> or MOCs, you bite the bullet and buy LEGO.
True, but again it's not a question of perfect quality but of sufficient
quality as compared with price. MegaBloks is a favorable value IMHO since
the gap between LEGO price and MB price is larger than the gap in quality
between the two products.
> Thanks for reading this far.
Oh, I stopped reading several paragraphs ago! 8^)
Dave!
FUT only to OT.clone-brands
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