

Lego's packing process isn't perfect - DiabloD3
http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=53

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tmh88j
>I came up with an interesting idea — a missing bag.

I would assume that Lego precisely measures the individual bags, not the
entire set. What the author said about a missing bag pretty much confirms my
suspicion of this. They must have some QA measure to determine the number of
bags included, but weighing the entire box will result in less precision than
the individual bags. Not to mention, if it does show up as less weight, the
entire box needs to be checked out, not just one bag.

~~~
Someone
They can measure the bags, but that does not guarantee that those bags end up
in the box.

Also, there is a series on Discovery called "How it's made" (or so) I remember
seeing one about Lego; they did measure the box.

That leaves open the risk of exchanging bags. Maybe, they are decreasing that
by making sure that all bags hanging around when they are filling boxes for a
particular set are different in weight?

I do not know whether that makes sense for huge sets, though. The variance in
weight between boxes would, at some set size, outstrip the average size of a
bag.

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unwind
This part:

 _Along the way, we both learnt some important facts about the Lego
manufacturing process_

made me smile. I'm not sure if it's tongue-in-cheek or not, but the post does
go on with quite the analysis (all based on guesses) of how they might have
ended up with a set that was missing quite a few pieces. Still, I think the
number of humans for which this hand-waving is considered to be both a)
important and b) facts is quite limited. :)

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seclorum
I've always wanted to build a lego sorter/filter that is basically a box with
various sieve levels inside, where you pour the unsorted pieces in the top,
they cascade through the sieves, and out the bottom/along the sides come
pieces, sorted by shape/size. The mathematics of this fascinates me, and I
think it could be done .. but where to start with the math? Anyone know of
anything like this .. ?

~~~
lzy
<http://www.box4blox.com/>

~~~
seclorum
Well, thats exactly what I had in mind! I wonder if they're working on a Lego
Techniks version .. thanks for the headsup!

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smackfu
>The first that boggles many Lego builders of such large sets, is the
arrangement of pieces within the bags.

Actually, a lot of the larger sets now use numbered bags around bags, so that
you only have to deal with 1/2 or 1/3 of the parts at once.

Not all the large sets though... I just built the VW Bus and it was just a big
piles of 1300 bricks.

