larry marak

Interesting seeing Kazi doing a direct copy of a Lego issued design. Kazi does make Lego patented elements that are currently under patent protection, such as the "cheese" slope, but this is the first time I've seen a direct design steal from them. Peppermint has the distinction right between cloners and bootleggers (or pirates). By the way, Bricks is a subbrand of Enlighten, Brick is Wit Toy Company attempting to sell their clones of Lego products while fooling Chinese buyers into thinking they are buying and Enlighten brand :-}. Wit is an outrageous pirate, they do many copies of Lego sets from 5 and 10 years ago. Best way to pick up the Steven Spielberg Studios sets. Wonderful photos though, thanks and keep it up. Lego fans need to know what the competition is in order to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of Lego.

In general construction toys do much better during recessions. As posted above, Lego (and Knex) had sizeable boosts in sales in the 2008 Christmas season and the trend is accelerating. TRU and other stores are banking on a large Christmas construction toy binge for 2009, and other systems (Uberstix and Erector{and yes, ugly as they are, Uberstix Do work with everybody's systems}) and new toy systems (TRIO) are popping up like mushrooms in TRU.

Latest K'nex brick design breakthrough. In the above mentioned aircraft set, in the spy plane model, K'nex introduces double sided friction pins that lock seamlessly into the tubes of knex bricks (K'nex brick tubes are open at the top of the brick and beveled at both the top and bottom of the tube). These new pins allow you to seamlessly connect bricks bottom to bottom! After 50 plus years of Afol complaining, someone has finally come up with the equivalent of a zero thickness doublesided plate!!! :-}.

It does mean that there will be another part number in the bricklink listings, but the hollow stud is backwards compatible and more importantly forwards compatible. Tente and Megablok have used hollow studs for antenna mountings, flames, and other extensions literally for decades. Just as many Lego designs are now public domain, so many element types from other companies have lapsed patents and are fair game for TLG. If the element works perfectly, by all means adopt it.

Depends a lot on the store. Go to the South Gate store on Lakewood for the large white Creator car set among others. I picked up the Creator Variable Wing fighter Creator set (who says TLG isn't a war toy company???) and a spring motor racer there yesterday. :-}

Glad to help.

For those of you with a Big Lots store nearby, you might want to check their toy section for reduced price Lego. I just picked up 3 racer minisets and two creator minisets and the Penguin and Robin Batman set at a Big Lots for a total of $30, making the pricepoint 7.5 cents per element. Its always worth checking remainder stores, here in California those would be Big Lots, Ross Dress for Less, Marshall's, and Tuesday Mornings.

Admonition received and accepted. Now my wife is a lego purist. Her entire supply of parts are Lego. To keep her happy, I have to keep all my parts in the garage. But I'm not bitter. All it took was one part by another manufacturer that didn't have sufficient clutch and she became a purist. The advantage of being a purist is that part numbers, inventories, and plans are on line at Bricklink and Peeron. Lego has been until recently the only brick maker you can order additional parts from, a tremendous advantage to hobbists. (the newcomer is Knex, which has a PAB program and will sell you any component from any instruction set they have in stock).

Lego purism is an example of obsessive/compulsive behavior. The "victim" cuts him/herself off from a world of remarkable new parts and a broad spectrum of colors in return for the availability of a wide variety of parts in a variable range of colors. I haven't got a moc that doesn't use parts from at least 3 manufacturers. Where would the world of bricking be without plates with studs on 3 sides, 75 degree slopes with a 2x4 base and a 1x2 top, hexagonal plates, 1 x 24 stud long bricks, the lanterns and trees from IntelliBlox or for that matter the intergration of "Quarks" (Uberstix) between the underside of brick tubes. The tube and stud building system developed by TLG from its creator Kiddiecraft, has been public domain for decades now. A brick is a brick people. Larry Marak, the clone ranger rides again! And I guess that with posts like the above I will always remain just a vassal on Eurobricks. :-)

Just an update, the next 8 K'nex (mainly) brick sets are out, the Racecar Rally and Aircraft Series. They feature, among other new items to brickdom the 1x24 brick!

. Maybe the other stuff just isn't selling? Natman, During the 2008-9 Christmas toy selling rush, only two construction toy companies saw major gains in sales. Lego was up 30%, Knex was up 20%. MegaBrands, Best Lock, Erector, Playmobil, and Revell (yes, they make a building system, using cardboard elements!!!!! and plastic stays) all did worse during the recession than the previous year. The addition of bricks to Knex's palatte seems to be working for them.

The set here is one of the last sets made for Best Lock by the Little White Dragon co. of Chengdu, the city almost destroyed in a massive earthquake nearly a year ago. Their new source in TRU is the Coco Toy Co of Shanghai (not the infamous Coko). In the new 240 piece fire fighter's set you will find minifigs with Lego style legs, and a host of new building elements never before seen in the Lego scale palatte, the most unususal of which is the 11 x 19 baseplate! There are nearly 40 never before seen parts in this set, including 1x1 octagonal tiles.

Nice little impulse set. As the price goes up, the piece to price ratio drops with Knex sets. I suspect the set designers over at Knex still haven't he knak of assigning artisitically appropriate roles to brick and stick in their contstruction. The largest brick-heavy sets they've issued are the Road Rig series, in which about 60 percent of the vehicles is brick and plate. By the way, they have also released 4 mosaic sets, a continuation of Lego's recent Mosaic releases. Transclear baseplates and many hundreds of 1x1 bricks, accompanied by just a handful of micro-knex elements to provide a 3-d or motion aspect to the mosaic sets. These are called Picture Brick sets by Knex (Hasbro in the U.K., Tomy in France).

I am still enamoured of the thought of a minifig scale ferriswheel which is also quite sturdy.] By the way Peppermint, K'nex also makes minifigs, brick compatible of course, differing only in that the hands, unlike Lego, form micro-scale sockets, not clips. Besides a civilian line, they have space, racers, and knight minifigs.

The Lego stores have been doing this for a while now. Check the section every two months. I suspect that they fill the bins with minifig components that have been surplused from discontinued sets. Just recently in Glendale Ca I picked up 4 batman cowls and 5 long red hairpieces from surplused Arkham Asylum minifig components.

Knex's idea was to make bricks that would allow interfacing of standard and micro knex elements with bricks, Knex and Lego both. As the bricks and plates have rounded elements to be safer for children, Knex created a tweezers style brick separator which is included in every boxed set. Adapter elements allow you to use "technic" style pins to make any brick or plate a rod, and adapter plates to allow you to turn any standard size Knex connector into a brick! Two adapters on a Snowflake (an 8 rod connector) give you a double sided brick! As the years have passed Knex has given more thought to brick design. 1x1 bricks are square and sharp corned, just like Lego. Light bricks are 1 and 1/3 bricks tall, with two small emitters in studs to light us translucent 1 by one bricks. The reliable Knex motor now has a brick housing, allowing immediate motorization of any brick model. They also created a number of unique brick elements, not seen by any other company. The T brick and the H brick, tall studded plates (studs 4 times larger than normal) which can function either as a normal plate when placed under a brick, or as a set of bars when placed under another plate. These tall studded plates led to the creation of a line of "super" elements, large bricks (8x12 etc. ) and 4 stud and 8 stud wide axel rods (2/3 of a brick thick) that lock on with a death grip clutch to the brick above them. The provide far greater clutch stregnth than you can get with the best Lego bricks. These Knex bricks and their adapters have also lead to a rennaisance in the micro-scale knex parts. Where before these were very rarely used, they are now integral to every Knex set.

Nobody keeps the Disney licenses for long, and everybody has had them at least once, including Brix Blox. I suspect Disney just wants too much residuals and two much artistic control on the releases to be a good partner to any non Disney-owned company.

I really think it is marketing. Girls are just as likely to play with legos as boys..look in any lego sponsored free play area. The sets have been marketed to boys, boys on the advertising, boys on the commercials. Females are genetically hard wired to be more color sensative than Males, due to gender specializing for hundreds of thousands of years as gatherers while the men were the risk taking hunters (and men who didn't take risks starved to death). Females should actually be more drawn to lego elements, as these have better genetic gathering and organizing skills

I'm just a dyed in the wall open market believer. Lego prices in Europe will go down when there is more competition. If Lego has to sell products of equal quality to competitors that sell for half Lego's price, TLC will die on the vine. To the list of companies competing with TLG in Europe , the ailing Mega Bloks, Best Lock, Cobi of Poland, and K'nex (coming on strong apparently) we must now at Sluban of China. Sluban cut its eye-teeth cloning not Lego but Oxford of Korea, and is now of equal quality to the big guys. They now have a distribution arrangement in the Benelux countries and are looking for retailers. Their lego-compatible train sets sell for 30% of what TLG is charging in Europe, and half of what TLG is charging in the U.S.A. for its new battery powered trains.

def, is DiaBlock still the primary brick company in Japan? Their company website is still up and they seem to be current with their sets from the Transformers movie. (For those Americans reading this, Diablock was sold in the U.S. for 2 decades in the 70's and 80's as Lok Bloks and Brix Blox (Sears label).

Could it just be that its a lot more expensive to do business in the Eurozone than in the U.S. It sure sounds like each country still requires separate regulations, oversights, and taxes at multiple steps from Billund to the local store. In the U.S. Lego just deals with three outlets, their own stores, a handful of huge retail corportations, who receive priority shipping, and the independent toy dealers, who receive 2nd class treatment compared to the big box chains. Anywhere in the continental U.S. you are more likely to find Lego at a TRU, Walmart or Target than at a toy store, and in each case the merchandise goes from the factory to just one distributing center to a company-owned retail outlet.

. Alot of the Chinese clone sets look remarkably like their LEGO counterparts on first glance. Does anybody have any information on this? It depends on the patent protection statutes in each country. In some countries it has been illegal to import for sale any brick set at all that was compatible with Lego. Still that way in Denmark. In the Netherlands and Germany recent court decisions just legalized selling lego-compatible bricks (which led to Best-Lock's decision to form a partnership with Cobi of Poland to used Lego metric bricks and abandon their old scale. Coko got stopped dead in China because it made exact copies of Lego sets, a practice still going on today with other Chinese companies (Wit Toys/Bella being the prime offender). It costs a fortune to take a company to court, especially internationally. More recently, Lego defeated Enlighten in Beijing, but only for 46 elements currently under intellectual protection under PRC law. In Finland all Lego had to prove was that the sets looked like Lego products, whether they were copies of actual sets or independent products. A large number of non copied sets where destroyed there by court order.

The question of Lego pricing remains unresolved. Lego is 40% cheaper in the U.S. than in Europe because there's more competitor presence here and TLG choses to lower their price. As for the MB article, the company's financial situation is indeed just as bleak as discribed. The only errors in the article were details of the licensing agreements. MB never had a brick licensing deal for Transformers (Rose Arts had a coloring book deal, hence the confusion) and the Iron Man movie brick license is for the 2nd film.

Thanks Peppermint_M. I'm just one of an international group of people over at http://bloks.hyperboards.com That have made a hobby of researching clones. This is the Bloks Forum, which was originally set up as a MegaBloks AFOMB site but has expanded over the years to be an all construction system site. There is tons of information to mine over there in the Other Construction Systems folder and the Reviews All Systems folder. We've got quite an ecclectic mix there now, with discussions on Lincoln Logs, Knex, Lego, Oxford (and a source for buying Oxford!!!!!) as well as the original MegaBloks folder.

Definitely get at least 2. My wife and I are both builders, and we've got a dozen Lego brick seperators (they get lost easy). Plus 5 MB brick seperators, plus about 8 K'nex brick separators (excellent for curved topped elements, where a standard separator has no edge to press against.