CP5670

Lego Quality Reference

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Interesting news but all the 'be patient, give us time' disclaimers don't give me much hope things will change soon, if at all :sceptic:

We're still waiting for LEGO to fix basic yellow, which they are churning out in substandard shades in new parts such as in the City Construction sets and the Anakin's Y-Wing. It's been over 2 years! Reddish-brown continues to be wildly inconsistent, blah blah etc etc.

In short, improvements in colour either happen at a crawl and in some cases don't appear ever to be fixed.

Personally I don't think their Quality Control team even has a handle on what their product line is supposed to be if it required negative fan feedback to indicate that something as basic as one of their core products (ie minifigs) was suffering so badly.

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We're still waiting for LEGO to fix basic yellow, which they are churning out in substandard shades in new parts such as in the City Construction sets and the Anakin's Y-Wing. It's been over 2 years! Reddish-brown continues to be wildly inconsistent, blah blah etc etc.

In short, improvements in colour either happen at a crawl and in some cases don't appear ever to be fixed.

Personally I don't think their Quality Control team even has a handle on what their product line is supposed to be if it required negative fan feedback to indicate that something as basic as one of their core products (ie minifigs) was suffering so badly.

I think they are well aware of everything we've discussed here, but they won't admit anything in public (or have any incentive to fix the problems, for that matter) unless enough people notice and complain.

As for yellow, at this point it's safe to say that the TLG quality engineer at Brickfair 2008 was either misinformed (he turned out to be wrong about purple too), or was being intentionally misleading. It's been 15 months since then and we have seen little improvement on that color, even on new types of parts as you said.

Edited by CP5670

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Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but has anyone noticed a recent drop in quality? By recent, I mean in the past month or two. It seems as if most of the sets I bought in that time frame had parts with rounded/chipped corners, cracks/scratches on the bricks, obvious mold marks and "flash", as well as some obvious deformation and dents in rare cases. Maybe it's been like that for a while and I'm just noticing, but it seems like sets I bought 2-3 months ago are of better quality than ones I bought recently. The sets in question are a mix of 2008-2009 sets, so I don't understand why they would all suddenly have these problems out of the blue.

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Well, TLG just raised prices a year or two ago, and the oil prices keep going up, so I guess they're sacrificing quality to keep prices from going up again. Also, I believe the cracking Bionicle ball joints problem mainly started in 2008, after they created a new mold for joint sockets that has thinner, squared edges.

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Hi-I am back to note more cracking Lego-ugh. Bought 6743 for display recently, noticed the other day that there was severe cracking on almost all the wedges and headlight bricks. All Agent sets I have purchased have developing cracks in the minifigures, as well as P.Squiddy and a Space Policeman from those respective sets. Has anyone ever read anything directly addressing the prominence of cracked Lego? Its frustrating from a collector and a play standpoint.

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Hi-I am back to note more cracking Lego-ugh. Bought 6743 for display recently, noticed the other day that there was severe cracking on almost all the wedges and headlight bricks. All Agent sets I have purchased have developing cracks in the minifigures, as well as P.Squiddy and a Space Policeman from those respective sets. Has anyone ever read anything directly addressing the prominence of cracked Lego? Its frustrating from a collector and a play standpoint.

Headlight bricks are known to crack in a particular spot as discussed in the first post, and there have been one or two previous reports of cracked 1x1 slopes, if that's the piece you are referring to.

As for the minifigs, so far you are the only one who has experienced this issue to such an extent, so I don't really know what to tell you. My SP cops and Squidman have been fine. You can try checking for square indentations on the insides of the minifig arms, which indicate that they were made in a different, Chinese factory and may be of lower quality.

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I bought the 6242 Soldier's Fort yesterday and when I finished assembling the minifigs, I noticed something that was a bit unpleasant.

This minifigs torso,

pi093.jpg

is exactly like this picture. Lemonade yellow. :sick:

(The picture is from Brickset btw. Coincidence? :look: )

I also own the 6240 Kraken Attackin' and this torso is also on one of the minifigs. I compared the two torsos and the one from the 6240 was skin yellow, so OK.

Has anybody else experienced the same thing with the 6242 torso?

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Has anybody else experienced the same thing with the 6242 torso?

Yeah I remember the mismatch between the yellow pieces and the printing from this torso. I'm not sure, but I believe the torsos (at least one) I have (from 6241, 6242, and 6243) have the same problem.

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I'm not sure, but I believe the torsos (at least one) I have (from 6241, 6242, and 6243) have the same problem.

I've just checked the castaway minifig from the 6241 (the beard was hiding the torso and didn't bother to check it in the first place :blush: -thanks for the reminder :wink: ) and it seems OK.

I don't know about Brickbeard's Bounty copy since it's the only pirate set that I don't own.

The other minifig that seems to suffer from this infectious disease is the female one from the Pirates Advent Calendar. Her bust has the exact same lemonade-ish colour.

A wet T-shirt contest with lemonades in her case? :grin:

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The small spike pieces in the new atlantis sets quality is terrible. (The ones on the crabs legs and the shark/squid teeth.) :hmpf_bad: I tried to put them in a minifig hand and some of the plastic started peeling off like dead skin. :sadnew::cry_sad:

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I bought the 6242 Soldier's Fort yesterday and when I finished assembling the minifigs, I noticed something that was a bit unpleasant.

This minifigs torso,

is exactly like this picture. Lemonade yellow. :sick:

(The picture is from Brickset btw. Coincidence? :look: )

If you are talking about the torso, I can't see any obvious problem at least in that picture, but "lemonade yellow" sounds a lot like the junk yellow we've been getting for the last few years. :tongue: Do the arms have any square markings on their insides, as discussed earlier?

The small spike pieces in the new atlantis sets quality is terrible. (The ones on the crabs legs and the shark/squid teeth.) default_hmpfbad.gif I tried to put them in a minifig hand and some of the plastic started peeling off like dead skin.

Someone else brought up a separate issue with that piece a little while ago. I think we'll need to wait for those sets to become more widely available to learn more.

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The small spike pieces in the new atlantis sets quality is terrible. (The ones on the crabs legs and the shark/squid teeth.) :hmpf_bad: I tried to put them in a minifig hand and some of the plastic started peeling off like dead skin. :sadnew::cry_sad:

It seems they are made with weird plastic like spikes from Crystal King and broomsticks...

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If you are talking about the torso, I can't see any obvious problem at least in that picture, but "lemonade yellow" sounds a lot like the junk yellow we've been getting for the last few years. :tongue: Do the arms have any square markings on their insides, as discussed earlier?

The arms are OK. Their yellow tone seems normal and there are no square markings on them. The torso and just the torso is the part that seems to have this problem. If you look at the arms and the torso in the picture above, I believe that you can see a difference on the yellow tone. I wrote "lemonade yellow" in order to distinguish it from the "lime yellow" that some pieces and minifigs heads had.

Looking at the torsos again today under daylight, makes me notice that the female minifig from the Advent Calendar has an even more noticeable problem.

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The arms are OK. Their yellow tone seems normal and there are no square markings on them. The torso and just the torso is the part that seems to have this problem. If you look at the arms and the torso in the picture above, I believe that you can see a difference on the yellow tone. I wrote "lemonade yellow" in order to distinguish it from the "lime yellow" that some pieces and minifigs heads had.

Looking at the torsos again today under daylight, makes me notice that the female minifig from the Advent Calendar has an even more noticeable problem.

You do realize that the yellow on the torso is printing ? Or am I wrong ?

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You do realize that the yellow on the torso is printing ? Or am I wrong ?

Of course... As I've already said in the beginning, there is a difference between the same torsos that come from 2 different sets.

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I think what Front is getting at is that yellow on black printing always looks a little green and it has nothing to do with the quality of the plastic (quality of printing is a valid issue, however.)

Anyway, I've had a chance to open some 2010 sets and quality issues persist. Surprise surprise! Some of these are well documented, like the still-variable reddish-brown shades in Mariann Asanuma's Woody's Round Up Review and the variable shades of green in the Army Men on Patrol. Three years later, let's stop even using the excuse that old dodgy parts are somehow still in the supply chain 3 years after these problems first became evident :sceptic: These colour disfferences are here to stay.

Singlehandedly the worst part I've seen in a long time is a run of 1x2 white bricks modified with grill which I found in a (US market) 8086 ARC 170. The colour density is so low that they border on the transparent, and would be better described as 'cream' than white :sick:

It seems that every time they fix something, they stuff up somewhere else. It's the lack of consistency that is so frustrating as you don't know when something is going to go bad.

As another example, I bought the 4996 Creator Beach House from S@H when it was first released in Jan 08. I never really noticed the differences in shades and wondered why people used this as a test case for bad quality. But a few months ago I bought another one form S@H, clearly from a later production batch. The difference was astounding! Minor variations had polarised between the glowy alien yellow (as seen in the City Corner bus) and the greeny-blacky tinged shade which is also common. The set when assembled looked appalling! I went back to find my original set and was shocked at the brazen discrepancy. I think that even any parents and kids who would have bought this later version would be unable to miss this and if feedback starts to hurt LEGO where they supposedly care most - a reputation for quality!

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I have something to add to these discussion, especially Technic parts:

- the 20t double bevel gears (especially the tan ones) ( http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/19/100/32269.png )are very loose on their axles:

- grey (odd length) axle seem a little bit thinner than black (even length) axles

- Many 32L axles are not straight

- Lego started to use a new mold for the straight light bluish grey 16t gear ( http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/71/100/4019.png ) in the 2009 Technic sets. These gears were looser on the axles (especially the odd length ones) and the gears look flatter near the axle hole (no rounded corners). I have a set from 2010 and it seems to use the old tighter gears

- the angle connecters #2 ( http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/4/100/32034.png ) seem to be from new molds, especially the red ones don't have the number 2 on both sides anymore and they almost fall off the axle (especially odd length grey axles).

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I think what Front is getting at is that yellow on black printing always looks a little green and it has nothing to do with the quality of the plastic (quality of printing is a valid issue, however.)

Yes, I realised what Front meant. Even so, printing is a quality issue too as you correctly state, that's why I brought it up in the first place. Other minifigs that have a printed torso which resembles "bare skin" don't seem to have this problem.

Furthermore, even with two same torsos from different sets, it seems that there is also a noticeable difference. So, even if we take for granted that there is a difficulty of achieving the desired colour when printing on certain other colours, all identical parts should look the same. Crappy, maybe, but same. In my case, one torso is OK and the other is like a lemon popsicle.

Sorry if I sounded a bit repetitive in my posts. :blush:

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It seems they are made with weird plastic like spikes from Crystal King and broomsticks...

Yes, this is really becoming pretty annoying. It was like that with the brooms, so when you put a broom in a minifigure hand the broom gets damaged. My older brooms are really messed and my newer ones I even never put in a minfigure's hand. I do like those new spikes, because I don't use them for minifigures. Those new Atlantis tridents are also made from the same material... But with broomsticks and tridents it's pretty annoying because you can see that fast. It would be much better if those elements were made from the regular LEGO plastic. :thumbup:

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I found some bricks I wasn't really satisfied with in my Green Grocer:

- One tile with letter print wasn't ok. The print was bad; it was partly badly visible. It looked as if the tile with print were old.

- One round tile with printed clock pattern also had a little flaw. One line that indicates the hour was a bit blurred.

- All 24 slopes (65 degrees, 2x2x2) in my Green Grocer have a little crack on one of their sides. The crack begins at one of the studs and goes downwards at the side. The crack reaches downwards about one third of the length of the brick's side. The crack is easily visible in good light conditions.

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Merman, I can confirm most of your findings, regarding Technic, and would add that some light gray axles has excess material that prevent gears or pins to slide-on freely.

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I added a few things to the first post.

I have something to add to these discussion, especially Technic parts:

- the 20t double bevel gears (especially the tan ones) ( http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/19/100/32269.png )are very loose on their axles:

- grey (odd length) axle seem a little bit thinner than black (even length) axles

- Many 32L axles are not straight

- Lego started to use a new mold for the straight light bluish grey 16t gear ( http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/71/100/4019.png ) in the 2009 Technic sets. These gears were looser on the axles (especially the odd length ones) and the gears look flatter near the axle hole (no rounded corners). I have a set from 2010 and it seems to use the old tighter gears

- the angle connecters #2 ( http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/4/100/32034.png ) seem to be from new molds, especially the red ones don't have the number 2 on both sides anymore and they almost fall off the axle (especially odd length grey axles).

The 20t gear has always had this issue to some extent and seems to be simply designed like that. The light gray ones I have from the early 2000s are even worse. From what you say about the 16t gear, it actually sounds like they have gone back to an early version of that gear used in the 1980s, which was exactly as you describe. I didn't notice them or the weak #2 connectors in the 2009 sets I got, but I will take a closer look at those sets.

Anyway, I've had a chance to open some 2010 sets and quality issues persist. Surprise surprise! Some of these are well documented, like the still-variable reddish-brown shades in Mariann Asanuma's Woody's Round Up Review and the variable shades of green in the Army Men on Patrol. Three years later, let's stop even using the excuse that old dodgy parts are somehow still in the supply chain 3 years after these problems first became evident default_sceptic.gif These colour disfferences are here to stay.

As another example, I bought the 4996 Creator Beach House from S@H when it was first released in Jan 08. I never really noticed the differences in shades and wondered why people used this as a test case for bad quality. But a few months ago I bought another one form S@H, clearly from a later production batch. The difference was astounding! Minor variations had polarised between the glowy alien yellow (as seen in the City Corner bus) and the greeny-blacky tinged shade which is also common. The set when assembled looked appalling! I went back to find my original set and was shocked at the brazen discrepancy. I think that even any parents and kids who would have bought this later version would be unable to miss this and if feedback starts to hurt LEGO where they supposedly care most - a reputation for quality!

I added green and brown to the color list. Green at least has been fine in the past, but the problems with these colors were quite obvious in the review pictures you mentioned. My 4996 also contained examples of a number of the different types of recent problems. That set is quite cheap for its piece count, but there have obviously been compromises made to achieve that price point.

I've said before that Lego's reputation for part quality is undeserved today and is based on the company's past history, not on the present state of affairs. As far as the color problems are concerned, the key to seeing any changes is to get enough people to notice, and in a way I think the AFOL community is more at fault than TLG for largely ignoring this issue. Many who claim to be discriminating about quality and avoid clone brands for that reason seem to turn a blind eye to this, even though this is by far the most widespread quality issue. If people had raised anywhere near the kind of stink that they did with the 2004 gray change, we might not be having these problems today.

Yes, this is really becoming pretty annoying. It was like that with the brooms, so when you put a broom in a minifigure hand the broom gets damaged. My older brooms are really messed and my newer ones I even never put in a minfigure's hand. I do like those new spikes, because I don't use them for minifigures. Those new Atlantis tridents are also made from the same material... But with broomsticks and tridents it's pretty annoying because you can see that fast. It would be much better if those elements were made from the regular LEGO plastic.

Is this the same material that the metal detectors are made of? I have noticed the same issue with a few of those after putting them into minifig hands.

I found some bricks I wasn't really satisfied with in my Green Grocer:

- One tile with letter print wasn't ok. The print was bad; it was partly badly visible. It looked as if the tile with print were old.

- One round tile with printed clock pattern also had a little flaw. One line that indicates the hour was a bit blurred.

- All 24 slopes (65 degrees, 2x2x2) in my Green Grocer have a little crack on one of their sides. The crack begins at one of the studs and goes downwards at the side. The crack reaches downwards about one third of the length of the brick's side. The crack is easily visible in good light conditions.

The printing consistency issues in general have been noted, but the cracks on that piece are something I haven't heard of before. I'll keep that one in mind.

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I just put a golden trident in King Squid's hands for the very first time and I can confirm the problem with this piece. I've never had plastic shave off a piece like soft cheddar from a cheese grater before, but I have now. Wow. :look:

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Below a picture to illustrate the 16t gear issues

On the left the gear that was used up to and including 2008 and 2010

On the right, the 'bad', looser gear from 2009

1. the good gear has slightly smaller teeth

2. the good gear has a slightly smaller outer rim

3. the good gear has a shinier look, especially visible in these holes

4. the bad gear has an extra layer in the triangular shapes round the axle hole

Maybe it was a bad batch, but these 2009 gears are aweful and slide of the axle easily

16tgears.jpg

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In the last few sets I have received, the instructions have been inserted into each other (open both books up, place the right side on top of the other book's left side, and close both), which saves them from moving around and resulting in creased, damaged, and torn instruction manuals. However, on my recent Cargo Train (even though they have been discontinued), the instruction manual for the main locomotive was bent up and severely creased, while some of the smaller manuals (for the smaller wagons, of course) were put inside each other. The main problem with the train sets is that the cardboard rack containing the motor and RC transmitter is not secured down like previous sets, so it severely damages and creases the instruction manuals AND the stick sheet (to the point that some stickers were peeling off! :thumbdown:) .

The manuals that are inside each other have mostly occurred on exclusives (Fire Brigade, Medieval Market Village, etc.), and my damaged instruction manuals have come in non direct themes, such as City.

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