To be fair to Lego, which I agree is crazy expensive, they have tighter tolerances in flaws than NASA does. I work in manufacturing, through a different type, and tolerances that tight mean a huge amount of your production becomes scrap.
You could discuss the whether perfectionism is worth the waste, and that’s a valid point, but Lego is at least delivering a solid product
What a rediculous, and untrue, comparison to make. NASA (1) isn’t a consumer manufacturing company, (2) makes an absolutely insane variety of types science experiments from space telescopes to supersonic planes, (3) absolutely makes/uses parts with orders of magnitude tighter tolerances than Lego holds.
Lego’s competition has been improving their quality in the last few years, to a point where I’d argue some are on par or better (Cobi, Mould King, Xingbao).
At the same time Lego has started to produce in China like almost any other competitor and their quality has lapsed somewhat. Especially color accuracy has allegedly been shite, even in some VERY expensive sets.
Lego just isn’t worth an almost 100% premium, imo. If you’re in Europe check out Bluebrixx and Cobi. One makes licensed Star Trek sets, the other licensed cars like Škoda, Opel, Fiat, and others.
Once I worked out that Lego work to the same tolerances as the transistors in a Pentium II CPU. It’s probably a better example than NASA as NASA makes huge things that don’t require submillimetre tolerances and tiny precise instruments that couldn’t have been made a couple of decades ago.
Except there are competitors by now with equally good tolerances and overall part quality that still cost half as much, so that can’t really be the reason
To be fair, it’s still hit or miss, you need to do a little research to know what you’re getting, but it has gotten sooo much better in the last couple of years. At this point, any brand that uses pieces made by gobricks is going to give you excellent piece quality rivaling or even surpassing that of Lego in some aspects. My recommendations if you want to check it out are Pantasy and Funwhole, both make great original sets with high quality prints, the latter even with fully integrated light kits. Those are not the only options, but the best ones at the moment in my opinion
Edit to add: as said a lot has happened just in the last few years, so to get a good picture of the current quality landscape, even with the brands I mentioned it’s a good idea to stick to their newer sets for now, since you might still get earlier generations of bricks that are not quite as good with the older models that have been sitting on shelves for some time
To be fair to Lego, which I agree is crazy expensive, they have tighter tolerances in flaws than NASA does. I work in manufacturing, through a different type, and tolerances that tight mean a huge amount of your production becomes scrap.
You could discuss the whether perfectionism is worth the waste, and that’s a valid point, but Lego is at least delivering a solid product
What a rediculous, and untrue, comparison to make. NASA (1) isn’t a consumer manufacturing company, (2) makes an absolutely insane variety of types science experiments from space telescopes to supersonic planes, (3) absolutely makes/uses parts with orders of magnitude tighter tolerances than Lego holds.
This. Lego has amazing tolerance for a toy, but isn’t leading across the whole of the injection molding industry.
Lego’s competition has been improving their quality in the last few years, to a point where I’d argue some are on par or better (Cobi, Mould King, Xingbao).
At the same time Lego has started to produce in China like almost any other competitor and their quality has lapsed somewhat. Especially color accuracy has allegedly been shite, even in some VERY expensive sets.
Lego just isn’t worth an almost 100% premium, imo. If you’re in Europe check out Bluebrixx and Cobi. One makes licensed Star Trek sets, the other licensed cars like Škoda, Opel, Fiat, and others.
This is news to me, but I have been away from things for a while.
Once I worked out that Lego work to the same tolerances as the transistors in a Pentium II CPU. It’s probably a better example than NASA as NASA makes huge things that don’t require submillimetre tolerances and tiny precise instruments that couldn’t have been made a couple of decades ago.
Except there are competitors by now with equally good tolerances and overall part quality that still cost half as much, so that can’t really be the reason
I guess I’ve been out of it too long - I’ve always found knockoff brands just don’t have the same precision and quality.
To be fair, it’s still hit or miss, you need to do a little research to know what you’re getting, but it has gotten sooo much better in the last couple of years. At this point, any brand that uses pieces made by gobricks is going to give you excellent piece quality rivaling or even surpassing that of Lego in some aspects. My recommendations if you want to check it out are Pantasy and Funwhole, both make great original sets with high quality prints, the latter even with fully integrated light kits. Those are not the only options, but the best ones at the moment in my opinion
Edit to add: as said a lot has happened just in the last few years, so to get a good picture of the current quality landscape, even with the brands I mentioned it’s a good idea to stick to their newer sets for now, since you might still get earlier generations of bricks that are not quite as good with the older models that have been sitting on shelves for some time
Thank you for the really informative comment. I’ll keep that in mind when I have some money to spend :-)
I dare say that Fischertechnic/Meccano would’ve been a more durable solution in all those cases.
So much that it’s been used to make precision scientific equipment when the normal equipment would cost far far more.