Out of curiosity

[ks6349]

After watching the video on youtube about the manufacturing Lego bricks by TLG, I can see that most jobs are done automatically by modern machines, but the last step, before putting the instruction books, all bags are put into the box by human. Although it is very simple task, is there any reported case where missing one bag or having duplicate bag? Just wondering why this simple step is done by human. If they are worried about machine, I think every step should be worried, if they are not, there is nothing difficult to put a bag into the box by machine, why human? Just ask out of curiosity

[Johnny1360]

It could just be more economical, a human is less expensive to hire than building a machine to duplicate the requirements of the job at hand, or maybe has something to do with quality control. I can't say for sure but would be interesting to find out.

[JaBaCaDaBra]

3 hours ago, ks6349 said:

is there any reported case where missing one bag or having duplicate bag?

Yes, 2 of the same bags or wrong bags happens every now and then and it's quite difficult to convince service department that you're stuck with wrong parts.
Completely missing bag doesn't happen since this will trigger the weigh control alarm.
However... it happened to me that all cables in an EV3 set all were missing, missing parts dept. refused so a telephone call was needed.

[ks6349]

5 hours ago, Johnny1360 said:

It could just be more economical, a human is less expensive to hire than building a machine to duplicate the requirements of the job at hand, or maybe has something to do with quality control. I can't say for sure but would be interesting to find out.

If you have watched the video you will see that before sealing the box they threw the instruction booklets with machine. If human is cheaper why don't they also hire one guy to throw the booklets? I cannot see any difference between throwing a bag of bricks and throwing some instruction booklets

3 hours ago, JaBaCaDaBra said:

Yes, 2 of the same bags or wrong bags happens every now and then and it's quite difficult to convince service department that you're stuck with wrong parts.
Completely missing bag doesn't happen since this will trigger the weigh control alarm.
However... it happened to me that all cables in an EV3 set all were missing, missing parts dept. refused so a telephone call was needed.

Will they accept my request if my set has retired for a few years and I have only opened it recently and found problems. I do not even have an invoice because it wasn't bought in official stores.

Edited July 30, 2022 by ks6349

[dr_spock]

If they don't have the mising part of old out of production set in stock, you're basically SOL.  Try BrickLink, eBay, etc.  It's like trying to fix an old car when the manufacturer's parts are NLA.

 

[Agent Kallus]

8 hours ago, ks6349 said:

 is there any reported case where missing one bag or having duplicate bag?

 Just recently I had a dulicate bag in my copy of the Monkie Kid Fruit Flower mountain set, no bags were missing though I just had an extra bag with extra parts, a nice surprise.

[koalayummies]

2 hours ago, Agent Kallus said:

 Just recently I had a dulicate bag in my copy of the Monkie Kid Fruit Flower mountain set, no bags were missing though I just had an extra bag with extra parts, a nice surprise.

Lucky.

I think they should implement that as a business strategy. Every 500 sets they box up just toss in a random bag of parts, from a completely different set even. Would be fun.

[ks6349]

12 hours ago, koalayummies said:

Lucky.

I think they should implement that as a business strategy. Every 500 sets they box up just toss in a random bag of parts, from a completely different set even. Would be fun.

This is not a good idea. You can expect there will be a lot of rats bringing their own portable weight and weigh every set before purchase or going away to do again in other shops. This is not joke. I saw a guy weighing each, yes EACH bag of those random Lego minifigure small bag and causing nuisance to the counter and other customers.

[koalayummies]

3 hours ago, ks6349 said:

This is not a good idea. You can expect there will be a lot of rats bringing their own portable weight and weigh every set before purchase or going away to do again in other shops. This is not joke. I saw a guy weighing each, yes EACH bag of those random Lego minifigure small bag and causing nuisance to the counter and other customers.

Dang what the heck. As if feeling for the minifigures didn't already look ridiculous enough that guy is like "hold my drug scale".

[dr_spock]

1 hour ago, koalayummies said:

Dang what the heck. As if feeling for the minifigures didn't already look ridiculous enough that guy is like "hold my drug scale".

Those scales are awesome.  We use them sort out the LUGBULK orders.

[Mylenium]

On 7/30/2022 at 3:08 PM, ks6349 said:

Just wondering why this simple step is done by human.

There's no good way to grab a crinkled up and compressed bag with a machine and place it evenly in the open box. That's all there is to it. No need to look for conspiracy theories or deeper meaning, just one of those basic wisdoms of industrial packaging. Since the bags aren't filled with extra gas and the constituents of the contents are so different, the surface changes too much and the center of weight keeps shifting. Even advanced adaptive robots struggle with that and Humans simply can (still) do it faster.

Mylenium

[Toastie]

1 hour ago, Mylenium said:

Even advanced adaptive robots struggle with that and Humans simply can (still) do it faster.

Sounds absolutely reasonable - and also just a matter of time to get rid of these faulty humans soon enough.

Are there already robots out there that build robot packed LEGO sets? That would be fun to watch.

Best,
Thorsten

[ks6349]

18 hours ago, Mylenium said:

There's no good way to grab a crinkled up and compressed bag with a machine and place it evenly in the open box. That's all there is to it. No need to look for conspiracy theories or deeper meaning, just one of those basic wisdoms of industrial packaging. Since the bags aren't filled with extra gas and the constituents of the contents are so different, the surface changes too much and the center of weight keeps shifting. Even advanced adaptive robots struggle with that and Humans simply can (still) do it faster.

Mylenium

Why does it have to place the bags evenly in the open box? As soon as the sealed box is turned around up and down all bags run randomly......... Putting the bags by human gives me a strong belief that there must be some bags missing every one among hundreds of sets.

[dr_spock]

20 hours ago, Toastie said:

Sounds absolutely reasonable - and also just a matter of time to get rid of these faulty humans soon enough.

Are there already robots out there that build robot packed LEGO sets? That would be fun to watch.

Best,
Thorsten

I don't know about that.  I had a job making auto parts.  Every now and then something goes horribily wrong inside the CNC machine.  You open the CNC chamber door and scream, Oh my god! 

 

[Johnny1360]

3 hours ago, ks6349 said:

Why does it have to place the bags evenly in the open box? As soon as the sealed box is turned around up and down all bags run randomly......... Putting the bags by human gives me a strong belief that there must be some bags missing every one among hundreds of sets.

Yeah because machines are infallible. C'mon give us humans some credit, There are many things a human can do far better than any machine, and more economical as well, like I said in my first post. It will be a very, very long time before any machine reaches human capabilities, possibly never. 

[Toastie]

2 hours ago, Johnny1360 said:

It will be a very, very long time before any machine reaches human capabilities, possibly never.

True.

The thing though is, that currently these machines are trained on one individual task (let it be three :D), they do over, over, and over again. Maybe even learn, how to excel on that one task. Some call it AI, I call it decent programming along with decent sensors. Humans have done these tasks in the past, had a job, but ... well, the machine could do it faster and cheaper - this one thing. It may also drive humans crazy (and apparently has) - doing one thing over and over again - but again: They had a job and thus a "living". That is the weird part, isn't it? The machines are coming in, apparently making our lives so much better, and at the same time unemployment rates go up. So which lives became better? The ones of the owners of the machines, of course - it was and is like that since the industrial age and is the core idea of capitalism.

When you browse the net, have a go at semiconductor fabrication plants. Here is a good one. Hardly any humans visible in the fab's interior shots. These fabs are currently located mostly in Taiwan, where Nancy is visiting right now. It is incomprehensible, what's going on there - to make next gen iPhones. Or brains for drones. Or TV sets. Cars, that don't need us anymore. Yes, these cars do still f'up. But how many years did they have up to now? Let us just wait another decade. Or three. That is nothing. Three decades ago, the computer game Windows 3.11 (according to @JaBaCaDaBra, I love it ) was the next gen operating system (for the masses that is, not for the experts, they used Unix System V - Linux was yet to be developed :D). Three freaking decades.

So I'd be careful with the adverb "never". "Later", maybe. Later, as in "no further disclosed numbers of decades ahead", when both of us have fermented into organic junk since long. Easily outlived by ABS bricks and plates .

 

3 hours ago, dr_spock said:

Every now and then something goes horribily wrong inside the CNC machine.

Little off programming, critters, failure of tooling/material, or machine that had simply some fun?

Whenever a CNC machine does that in my group, it is the first or the third, which is kinda lame. I'd love to see second and fourth, that would be total fun! (I mean it - I would love it. As I love Ghostbusters).

Oh well. Maybe I am a bit too biased - they ran Terminator last night (again) on free TV ... original version

Best,
Thorsten

Edited August 2, 2022 by Toastie

[ks6349]

2 hours ago, Johnny1360 said:

Yeah because machines are infallible. C'mon give us humans some credit, There are many things a human can do far better than any machine, and more economical as well, like I said in my first post. It will be a very, very long time before any machine reaches human capabilities, possibly never. 

Machine will certainly replace human. Although it will be a very long time, I believe that it will not be never. Scientists funded by authorities and the rich are working hard in this way.

Edited August 2, 2022 by ks6349

[LegendaryArticuno]

On 8/1/2022 at 4:32 PM, Mylenium said:

There's no good way to grab a crinkled up and compressed bag with a machine and place it evenly in the open box.

I can't even do that as a human. Sometimes i'll open up a box to do a parts/bag check and I can never place the bags back in evenly, the box always end up a bit inflated.