Brittle Brown Strikes Again!

[Johnny1360]

Finally decided to disassemble my Cantina MOC, it was favorite and quite frankly my best, 32x32 build, using sets for parts that are all less than 10 years old. It was also a beast of a build, several thousand pieces.

I immediately noticed many pieces had broken, all dark brown, go figure. I had thought although it used to be common place TLG had "fixed" the issue, not so, more than just a few pieces are so brittle I can't even disassemble them. 

I mean they are so brittle they are like potato chips, any pressure at all and they disintegrate into tiny crumbs. Sadly it appears to effect all my plates, big and small, only dark brown.

Has anyone else been having this issue? To me it is unacceptable, especially since it was a known issue that was supposed to be addressed.

This is so sad, I guess I will remove Dark Brown from my color palette, since they are unusable anyway.

So far it's just plates but can bricks be far behind.

Edit; Had to pause on the tear down, just too many pieces breaking, I feel like I should document what's happening and I just don't have time now. It is quite alarming how many of the plates are shattering, close to 50% so far or about 30 different plates. You can literally reduce these pieces to dust just by gently squeezing them between your finger and thumb.These all came from sets between 2016-2018, so apparently the problem hadn't been addressed yet.

I would be very concerned if I had a lot of sets of this time period, which I do. I did take very good care of these parts and did nothing but use them for their intended purpose. Also makes me very leery of purchasing any sealed sets of that time period.

Edited March 15 by Johnny1360
Added some stuff

[Toastie]

This really sounds ... really bad.

2016 - 18 is not old. By no account, when looking at the many old bricks and plates around here - but in the classic colors. Which may have faded a bit, but I love that.

I mean - LEGO does not last forever. But (pure) ABS is surely close to that when not exposed high energy radiation, excessive heat and so on. Has been discussed numerous times. So it must be the additives - of which are "colors". Has also been discussed.

As far as I remember, dark brown was frequently regarded as "bad". You should take photographs or videos showing the disintegration. Or even just the debris.

A comparable thing happened to 9V wires - of some time. >No< other wires (LEGO or not) I had and have in my workshop disintegrated at all. Not only cables, but also 9V sensors are affected badly. TLG can make other wires; all 4.5V, 12V wires, several decades old still don't lose their insulation by touching.

There were also these liquifying rubber wheels TLG made for some time. 

Well, it is what it is, I guess. Wire-wise, you can repair them; rubber, brick, and plate wise - not. 

Regards,
Thorsten

[Stereo]

I don't know the exact years, but 2012-2017 for Dark Brown, Dark Red, and Reddish Brown are all the trouble area.  With certain piece designs they break while in a bag of loose parts, not connected to anything.  Other ones are fine as long as you don't push hard with a separator, just limited usefulness.

75099 I had one copy with the problem across about half the Dark Red, another copy with zero problem.  So that range (2015-2017) is when they corrected the problem... but they might not have purged it from their parts they'd already molded.

[Karalora]

Wasn't the issue a batch of substandard ABS wherein bricks of other colors had visual tells for the flaws, but the brown/dark brown/dark red color range masked it?

[MAB]

6 hours ago, Karalora said:

Wasn't the issue a batch of substandard ABS wherein bricks of other colors had visual tells for the flaws, but the brown/dark brown/dark red color range masked it?

I don't know, but there also seems to be a geographical possibility. I've had maybe five reddish brown parts break including a horse that crumbled the first time I moved the legs, but never any dark brown or dark red. Whereas Americans were reporting many more issues. So it could also be more of an issue with parts from a specific factory or the conditions (heat, light, aircon, ...) they are kept in. 

[JesseNight]

8 hours ago, Karalora said:

Wasn't the issue a batch of substandard ABS wherein bricks of other colors had visual tells for the flaws, but the brown/dark brown/dark red color range masked it?

I believe reading somewhere that the problem was with how color dyes chemically react with the base abs, and for some colors this resulting in troublesome results. I'm no chemistry expert but this could very well be possible.
 

20 hours ago, Johnny1360 said:

Edit; Had to pause on the tear down, just too many pieces breaking, I feel like I should document what's happening and I just don't have time now. It is quite alarming how many of the plates are shattering, close to 50% so far or about 30 different plates. You can literally reduce these pieces to dust just by gently squeezing them between your finger and thumb.These all came from sets between 2016-2018, so apparently the problem hadn't been addressed yet.

I think it was solved around 2017-2018, so there is a fair chance you have stuff from just before. I'm not sure if all of it got recalled from stores.