New 31030 part, half friction?

[anothergol]

Talking about this year's new 2M axle + pin with friction.

I only have 2 of them (still a rare part) and I've noticed a flaw, I wonder if it's a general one:

If you place a half-liftarm on the upper or lower-half of a normal friction pin, there's friction.

If you place a liftarm on the upper part of this new 31030, there is friction, but there is almost no friction on the lower part, *despite* the visible bumps that should be giving friction.

Result: on a full liftarm, that pin has half friction. It's certainly not as loose as a frictionless pin, but it's still rather loose. Seems like a fatal flaw to me, especially considering the price of this still rare enough part.

[Xfing]

I checked out the model you were referring to on Rebrickable. You mean Part 18651? It supposedly has traditional, full friction ridges.

Also, it's a semi-rare part, but I wouldn't call it rare. Rebrickable says it's found in 13 sets already, and it's only been introduced this year. MOCers seem to have liked it a lot.

http://rebrickable.com/parts/18651

[Gnac]

There are only two three friction ridges on the lower part (compared to 4 at the end) and they're slightly shallower. Hold it up with a light source behind and slowly rotate it to see.

It's a strange design decision, and I've yet to see an application which specifically vindicates it.

EDIT: While randomly larking about in my huge swimming pool of Technic pegs, I noticed that the blue axle pegs have this too, but don't suffer from the problem you described. Maybe it's due to the more flexy plastic of the newer ones? Dunno, I'm stumped.

Edited June 17, 2015 by Gnac

[anothergol]

I checked out the model you were referring to on Rebrickable. You mean Part 18651?

my bad, I thought I had given the part #, it was a set indeed

It's a strange design decision, and I've yet to see an application which specifically vindicates it.

ah, so it's by design, I thought it was a flaw

Talking about a flaw, a serious one IMHO, I wonder why Lego hasn't fixed this yet.

It (brackets side by side, here on a 2x4 plate) works in the LDD, it works with large brackets, but those small brackets are off by a fraction of mm, but enough to be very annoying.

Sure, we can avoid using them this way, but it's easy to see things getting off/wrong when playing with brackets in general, pretty sure this flaw is the source of all problems.