Sets
Since the 1950s, the Lego Group has released thousands of sets with a variety of themes, including town and city, space, robots, pirates, trains, Vikings, castle, dinosaurs, undersea exploration, and wild west.
While there are sets which can be seen to have a military theme – such as Star Wars, the German and Russian soldiers in the Indiana Jones sets, the Toy Story
green soldiers and Lego Castle – there are no directly military-themed
sets in any line. This is following Ole Kirk Christiansen's policy of
not wanting to make war seem like child's play.
The Lego range has expanded to encompass accessory motors, gears,
lights, sensors, and cameras designed to be used with Lego components.
Motors, battery packs, lights and switches are sold under the name Power Functions. The Technic line utilises newer types of interlocking connections that are still compatible with the older brick type connections. The Technic line can often be motorised with Power Functions.
Bionicle
is a line of toys by the Lego Group that was marketed towards those in
the 7–16 year-old age range. The line was launched in January 2001 in
Europe and June/July 2001 in the United States. The Bionicle idea
originated from the earlier toy lines Slizers (also known as Throwbots) and the short-lived RoboRiders. Both of these lines had similar throwing disks and characters based on classical elements.
The sets in the Bionicle line have increased in size and flexibility
through the years. Bionicle was discontinued and replaced with Hero Factory in 2010. Along with Hero Factory,another similar set has been made such as the Bionicle type Lego Legends of Chima, which use the same structure for the minifigures.
One of the largest Lego sets ever commercially produced is a minifig-scaled edition of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon.
Designed by Jens Kronvold Fredericksen, it was released in 2007 and has
5,195 pieces. It was surpassed, though, by a 5,922-piece Taj Mahal.
Design
A model of Trafalgar Square, London in Legoland Windsor
Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite
variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years,
each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks
from 1958 still interlock with those made in the current time, and Lego
sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.
Six pieces of 2x4 bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.
Each Lego piece must be manufactured to an exacting degree of
precision. When two pieces are engaged they must fit firmly, yet be
easily disassembled. The machines that make Lego bricks have tolerances
as small as 2 micrometres.
Primary concept and development work takes place at the Billund
headquarters, where the company employs approximately 120 designers. The
company also has smaller design offices in the UK, Spain, Germany, and
Japan, which are tasked with developing products aimed specifically at
these markets. The average development period for a new product is
around twelve months, in three stages. The first stage is to identify
market trends and developments, including contact by the designers
directly with the market; some are stationed in toy shops close to
holiday periods, while others interview children. The second stage is
the design and development of the product based upon the results of the
first stage. As of September 2008 the design teams use 3D modelling software to generate CAD drawings from initial design sketches. The designs are then prototyped using an in-house stereolithography
machine. These are presented to the entire project team for comment and
for testing by parents and children during the "validation" process.
Designs may then be altered in accordance with the results from the focus groups. Virtual models
of completed Lego products are built concurrently with the writing of
the user instructions. Completed CAD models are also used in the wider
organisation, such as for marketing and packaging.
A computer program (LEGO Digital Designer) is available for consumers to create their own digital designs, and a similar tool is available for the Chrome browser.
A service to ship physical models from LDD to consumers ended in 2012.
Manufacture
A Lego City
Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from a strong, resilient plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). As of September 2008, the engineers use the NX CAD/CAM/CAE PLM software suite to model the elements. The software allows the parts to be optimised by way of mould flow and stress analysis.
Prototype moulds are sometimes built before the design is committed to
mass production. The ABS plastic is heated to 232 °C (450 °F) until at a
dough-like
consistency. It is then injected into the moulds at pressures between
25 and 150 tons, and takes approximately 15 seconds to cool. The moulds
are permitted a tolerance of up to two micrometres, to ensure the bricks remain connected.
Human inspectors check the output of the moulds, to eliminate
significant variations in colour or thickness. According to the Lego
Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the
standard required.
Lego factories recycle all but about 1 percent of their plastic waste
from the manufacturing process. If the plastic cannot be re-used in Lego
bricks, it is processed and sold on to industries that can make use of
it.
Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Moulding is done in Billund, Denmark; Nyíregyháza, Hungary; and Monterrey, Mexico. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and Kladno
in the Czech Republic. The Lego Group estimates that in the course of
five decades it has produced some 400 billion Lego blocks.
Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 36 billion per
year, or about 1140 elements per second. If all the Lego bricks ever
produced were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62 Lego bricks. According to an article in Business Week in 2006, Lego could be considered the world's No. 1 tyre manufacturer; the factory produces about 306 million small rubber tyres a year. The claim was reiterated in 2012.
In December 2012, the BBC's More or Less programme asked the Open University's
engineering department to determine "how many Lego bricks, stacked one
on top of the other, it would take to destroy the bottom brick?"
Using a hydraulic testing machine, the engineering department
determined the average maximum force a 2×2 Lego brick can stand is 4,240
newtons;
since an average 2×2 Lego brick has a mass of 1.152 grams (0.0406 oz),
according to their calculations it would take a stack of 375,000 bricks
to cause the bottom brick to collapse, which represents a stack 3,591
metres (11,781 ft) in height.
Private tests have shown several thousand assembly-disassembly cycles before wear-out, although Lego test for fewer cycles.
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