Lego padding piece count?

[mispeled]

I was lucky enough to receive the Orthanc tower for Christmas and I started building it right away because I've wanted the set since it came out 6 months ago. It’s huge, so I am only about 1/3 done, but I noticed something that made me think.

In more than a couple of places when building the set, I noticed that Lego would use two pieces when one would do. For instance, in a couple of places Lego uses two 1x4 black plates in place of one 1x8 black plate.

If it was a case of not making that piece in that color, or something like that, I would understand, but the set has tons of 1x8 black plates used in other places, so I know it’s not that. It doesn't really make any difference to the build – either two 1x4 or one 1x8 works here, but it seems weird to me.

So what’s going on here? Does Lego do this to make the piece count look larger than it should be? Or is there some other reason for this kind of thing? What other reason would make them do that?

[62Bricks]

We can only guess, but I doubt it's only to increase the piece count. It may have to do with how many 1x4 plates LEGO has on hand from other production runs. It certainly is a more common piece than the 1x8 so perhaps they are balancing a surplus in their inventory by substituting them for the 1x8 where it makes no difference?

[aurly]

TLC gets to choose between people complaining about big pieces, and people complaining about small pieces.

[Darth Dino]

Hi

there are two reasons for that, economical and practical:

Itis cheaper for Leho to reduce the amount of different pieces in one set. The more different pieces there are, the more sorting and filling machines have to be there. If two bricks of one type that is already in the set will work, Lego would choose that option instead having a diffrent new piece.

Second, it is just more usefull for everbody to have more butsmaller pieces. Think of the opposite: the latgest pieces, e.g. hill pieces of castle have often just a single use. Small 1x2 and 1x4 elements can be used everywhere.

Dino

[fred67]

I noticed that, too, and I think generally that: 1) the designers are given some specifications they need to meet, and encouraged to use some pieces over others, and 2) I do think they want you to be able to build your own creations more generically.

I don't normally have a problem with it except when I see a weak point that could have been made better with a single larger piece rather than smaller ones, but it doesn't happen that often.

[mispeled]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to give the impression that I was unhappy with it. It doesn't really matter to me either way. It was just something I noticed and thought was weird. It doesn't change the structural integrity of the tower at all, since they aren't used in places where a piece needs to span a gap.

The sorting machines thing does make sense - i didn't watch closely enough to see if the bags that had steps that used 1x4s in place of 1x8's also contained 1x8s - they might not have. If the numbered bags came from different areas of the factory where only certain pieces were stocked, it would make sense to use the pieces common to that area. Balancing inventory makes sense, too.

As for the idea that one piece is already in the set - that's the thing, Orthanc uses both 1x4s and 1x8s in different parts of the build. Both are already included. I was just curious why 1x4s were sometimes used in places where a 1x8 would work fine.

The idea that more smaller pieces are better for MOCs and stuff like that - I'm not really convinced that goes into the thought process of the designers and Lego. AFOLs certainly consider that, but I don't see a huge reason why Lego would want to consider that unless you go so far as to say that Lego is really worried about a set's AFOL appeal.

[LEGO Historian]

At first I was going to make the point that sometimes TLG will change something because it might reduce the need for another production run of a particular (1x8 black plate?) part. However, this scenario would not be known when the instructions are designed and printed... so increasing the versatility of usage for secondary type LEGO models could be a more reasonable answer.

There is at least 1 known example where TLG did take some action to avoid another production run of a particular part. That was in the 2006 version of the 10152 Maersk Ship. TLG was almost out of Maersk blue 2x4 bricks for that set... so they contacted the model shops to cover the shortage of these, rather than making another production run. The only way that we know this to be fact is because the Maersk blue 2x4 bricks that were obtained from the model shops... was because the four 2x4 Maersk blue bricks in many of these 2006 10152 sets date to a pre 1990 design (no cross supports on the underside... they are 3001old rather than 3001 mold types). However... this scenario may likely have been because TLG wasn't sure that another Maersk model was in the future lineup for TLG.

Edited December 26, 2013 by LEGO Historian

[dr_spock]

Pick A Brick has black plates 1x4 for 10 cents and 1x8 for 20 cents each. Maybe they can produce more 1x4s per mold than 1x8s?

It could be a inside joke among the designers to drive AFOLs crazy.

[Deathleech]

AFOLs certainly consider that, but I don't see a huge reason why Lego would want to consider that unless you go so far as to say that Lego is really worried about a set's AFOL appeal.

I think Lego takes AFOLs into account more than you may think. In the Mirkwood Elf Army designer video, the designer specifically states the elven minifigures did not have any flesh color on their torsos to keep them more appealing for use with yellow AND flesh heads.

[jimmynick]

Is it so TLG can have a consistent "look" throughout the set? When I was building Fallingwater, I noticed there was an area that could have been tiled with a 1x4 and a 1x2, but was done with 3 1x2 tiles. I suspect the latter was chosen to hav e consistent "look" of 1x2 plates on the roof of the building.

[Vee]

I believe in the theory that Lego does this just to increase piece number and/or because most probably it is cheaper to produce 2 1x4's then 1 1x8. Why? Because "money talks", it is all about the money. They want the set to cost them less and they want the set to impress us more.

In some situations, like the Robbie House, the size of the pieces _is_ part of the design, but I don't think it is for the Orthanc Tower.

[Phoxtane]

One of the members of my LUG who has more personal experience with this than I do told me that it's due to the fact that it is easier to sort into the bags a lot of 1x4 plates instead of a mix of 1x4 and 1x8 plates. What's interesting is that if you pay attention whilst building a set, you'll start to notice that this pops up more frequently than you'd think - I bet it's also part of the reason why the insides of a lot of sets have oddly colored pieces in places where you'd never see the colors!

[JGW3000]

I bet it's also part of the reason why the insides of a lot of sets have oddly colored pieces in places where you'd never see the colors!

I have thought the reason for having varying color parts in hidden places was to facilitate the build process and clarify the instructions - its much easier to place a red/blue/green part into a sea of gray, for example, and verify the build is correct, than it is to place yet another grey block into a build of grey blocks. For an example look inside the abdomen of Shelob (set 9470), very useful to see that the build was done correctly via use of the odd red and green bricks.on the inside.

[Faefrost]

I think a little bit of it is tangentially related to padding not so much piece count as it is padding build experience. For sets, particularly the D2C more adult targeted sets, they are trying to create a better or more involved "build experience". At heart this often means more parts simply to create the same thing, and only using large parts when needed structurally.

[ShaydDeGrai]

Logistically, the most likely reason for the part substitution has to do with "filling stations" on the production line.

IF the Lego factory is like most packaging assembly lines (and I have no inside knowledge to confirm this but it's probably a safer assumption than many), there's a series of filling stations that each add one type of part to a container (polybag) that moves from station to station. Each filling station "understands" the part it is adding so it can count how many parts it contributes before allowing the container to move on. Most systems in use today do this by weight, though optical and haptic (touch) sensing is also viable. In a weight/mass system, a container comes in, is weighted and items are added until the weight of the container is increased by at least the combined weight of the pieces the given station was supposed to add. This is why each station only does one type of part - the weight of the parts needs to be uniform or it won't know if it filled the bag accurately - it would also explain why you sometimes get extra parts but almost never are missing one.

The scales themselves have ranges of sensitivity and while you _could_ have a machine that's equally capable of accurately counting a single cheese slope or 1x1 round plate as it is two dozen 1x12 Technic beams, it's cheaper to have some filling station that specialize in tiny weights and others that work on a more macro level. I suspect this is what TLG does as it would explain why we often see a small bag of tiny parts nested in a larger one of heavier/more redundant parts - a production line of high sensitivity scales produces the inner bag and the bag itself becomes a single "fill item" on the larger assembly line because now the combined weight of all its contents is enough for the higher weight class machines to count it accurately.

So what does this mean for Orthanc and multiple 1x4's versus 1x8's? It could mean that somewhere in the development cycle, someone was trying to figure out what parts were going to go in which bags and realized the contents of the bags themselves were getting too diverse for the packaging lines. Packaging something as complex as a Lego set is an interesting optimization problem and somewhere out there I'm sure TLG has a program that knows exactly what the capacity of each filling station and packaging line is and has optimization software to ensure that, when a given line is active, it is being used effectively. If a bag contains ten different types/colors of parts, obviously you need at least 10 filling stations that know how to process those parts. If you only need 10 classes of parts in a given bag, you don't want that bag being filled on a line with 50 filling stations because the other 40 stations are sitting idle when they could have been filling a more complicated bag (possibly for a different set). This creates a situation where, even though a given set may make use of two particular types of parts overall, there the limitations of the packing line may dictate that a given poly-bag many only hold X classes of parts and, for multiples of a given part in a given bag, the total weight of those parts must be between Y and Z.

It's the sort of thing I'm sure the original designer never even considers in the prototype, but I can easily see the engineers coming back to him/her two months laters saying "at this point in the build, could you possibly eliminate the need for these 2 1x8 plates and substitute 4 1x4's instead? It will let us put all the parts in one poly-bag on a line running at 90% capacity, otherwise we'll have to break things up into two bags and run each line at less than half capacity - that's a high production cost to absorb for a couple of plates."

This is all pure supposition on my part, but it's based on real-world constraints that I know other companies have to face in the long cycle of product design, refinement and packing; I don't see any reason why TLG would be the exception to the rule.

[LEGO Historian]

Sigh.... packaging LEGO sets has come a long way since the 1950s and 1960s....

[ShaydDeGrai]

Sigh.... packaging LEGO sets has come a long way since the 1950s and 1960s....

Very true, I'd like to think that the people in those photos were glad to see their jobs taken over by robots so that they could move on to less mind numbing activities, but I know that's rarely the case when factories automate.

On a lighter note, I'm sure you're old enough to remember the classic "I love Lucy" bit with Lucille Ball working as a packer in a candy factory trying to keep up with a conveyor belt and the chaos that ensued - just imagine what she could have done in a LEGO factory...

But back to topic, if the set had been hand-packed like they were 50 years ago, we wouldn't be debating the question of why use two parts when one larger one will do, we'd probably be complaining that Lego simply couldn't make big detailed sets like that in the first place because they'd be too labor intensive to package anywhere outside of a North Korean forced labor camp or some third world sweatshop.

[Faefrost]

This is all pure supposition on my part, but it's based on real-world constraints that I know other companies have to face in the long cycle of product design, refinement and packing; I don't see any reason why TLG would be the exception to the rule.

That is probably the most understandable breakdown of how the TLG packaging system most likely works, that we will ever hope to read. Thank you so much.

It also gives us a great deal of insight into some of the often not thought of or misunderstood aspects of set design. I know there are some people that believe that MOC'ers design better stuff than the actual Lego designers. ShaydGrai's wonderful breakdown helps to clearly highlight some of the truly complex differences between making a model (MOC) and designing a set for production.

[TheLegoDr]

At first thought, you would think LEGO is padding piece counts to fool us simpletons thinking we got a great deal. Obviously there is more to it than that, and from reading what the above posters have said, it makes sense as to why certain pieces would be picked at certain times. I definitely like following what some of you people have to say because it keeps me informed on a more business/engineer focused side of things. I don't have any background in any of that, so it is interesting to read about.

[LEGO Historian]

But back to topic, if the set had been hand-packed like they were 50 years ago, we wouldn't be debating the question of why use two parts when one larger one will do, we'd probably be complaining that Lego simply couldn't make big detailed sets like that in the first place because they'd be too labor intensive to package anywhere outside of a North Korean forced labor camp or some third world sweatshop.

Sadly... automation only went so far in keeping major LEGO production in Denmark and Connecticut... Even with a totally automated production and packaging system, it wasn't enough to prevent the production of LEGO from offshoring to Mexico and Hungary/Czech Republic... with specialized minifig production going to China.

Edited December 28, 2013 by LEGO Historian

[Adamskii]

I just assembled the Lego fire truck 60002, garbage truck and Octan fuel truck and noticed this as well. the part that specifically was used oddly was the 1 x 4 white tile with a stud on each end. The fire truck assembly has several of these in use such as front bumper, under the ladder latch on the roof. But the same piece is used under other plates and therefore hidden, and I would of figured a normal 1 x 4 white plate would be used in that scenario. My only conclusion is that its easier for the parts bag to have 7 of a single multi use item added (and weighed/counted/sorted) than to have to add 2 separate parts. The other trucks had similar themes.

Furthermore I was assembling the police station 7498 we got for Christmas, and there are numerous examples of this sort of thing happening. The floor of the office block is made of several 4 x 6 plates rather than 2 single large plates. Also it continually uses the white 1 x 2 brick with a garage door groove in the side, in places where a normal white brick would suffice - indeed at the expense of the overall look of the model.

These are just some examples from my experiences on this the last week of building. What I find odd is the use of the red plate round 1 x 1 in highly visible places that make no sense whatsoever when a white plate 1 x 1 square is needed? (police station)

Adam

[Boettner Builds]

So, after coming back out after my Dark Ages, I've noticed something. On a number of smaller Hobbit sets, They have been using 2 1X3's instead of 1 2X3. I've seen this on a couple of different sets with different pieces. It suprised me instantly, and I thought to myself, TLG is doing this to UP the part count. Then I thought, maybe they're just giving us building options later.

Has anyone else noticed this and felt the same way?

[1992pb]

Maybe the mould for 2x3 plates (or bricks, you didn't specify ) is broken or out of service... There could be other reasons than just increasing part count.

Edited March 11, 2014 by 1992pb

[Boettner Builds]

Plates It doesn't really bother me, just something I noticed.

[imvanya]

I've noticed the same things in a number of sets. I personally see it like this. If a set is designed in such a way that it uses a certain piece only one or two times and this piece can be replaced with another piece already used in the same set 5 times (in your case, 2 1x3 instead of 1 2x3), it will be replaced. In my opinion the main reason for this is to avoid producing relatively rare pieces. As I understand it, at the factory every piece is produced in its own line, and having a line that would potentially produce a piece only used twice in only one set is rather expensive