Making of a Brick
Today from Mr. K’s Remainders: A totally cool isometric cartoony explanation of how Legos are made.
Exploring the same site (Pop & Company) a little more, I found this: Super Mini-Games! Justice Leage Super Cubes and Mashi-Mojo are my favorites.
REPLY))
Based on my experience, this little anim is not entirely correct.. I\’ll attach my big explanation email to explain:
I think they have a more automated factory in denmark, but there are some
pretty substantial differences between what that little anim shows and what
went on at the plant I worked at.
Major differences:
1) The granules come from trucks, but are stored in big reinforced cardboard
boxes called \”gaylords\”. A forklift driver would use a forklift to transport
the gaylords to a staging area, which was cleverly named \”staging area\”. From
there I would take each gaylord out of staging, and use a forklift to put it
on a special hydraulic ramp. You had to use a forklift cause each gaylord
would weigh about 2 tons. Anyway you put it on the ramp, cut it open, and
there was this gigantic vacuum cleaner that you had to move around manually
that came down from the ceiling that sucked the granules out of the gaylord
into the giant 3 story hopper. From there, another system of pumps would pump
the granules into the moulding machines. It takes about 10 minutes to suck
one gaylord.
2) There were no automated moving robots on the moulding floor, although I
think they were starting to test them out right after I left. Basically,
after all of the bricks were boxed, I would take a hand truck (no forklifts
allowed in moulding rooms for obvious reasons) and move the completed box over
to a pickup area where the bricks would get moved eventually to a warehouse
where they were later \”decorated\” hahaha and packaged.
The molding machines themselves were automatic, but there are constant waves
of people always fixing them, cleaning the filters and pumps, etc..
The actual process of feeding the granules was pretty manual, and labor
intensive.. you had to look at every shipment of granules to make sure there
were no imperfections. lego works like everywhere else, quality control is
actually impossible, so when you find 1 defect in a batch, you must assume the
whole batch is defective, and the whole thing gets scrapped. One batch is A
LOT of legos, like tons of them. I wonder if they\’ve somehow made it more
automated. I have to think they have.