Does Lego still make non-minifig printed parts?

[JopieK]

@faefrost: I totally agree, my nieces and also the children of some dear friends really enjoy stickers, 'uncle Johan' is very popular at some moment for printing custom (personalized) stickers for them :p

Did not think about that before, we normally target AFOL's, and I see printing for kids in our family / friend circles just as a fun thing, but maybe indeed children find printed parts less appealing than stickers. I will ask them about it.

[The_Skirrid]

It's also pretty easy to predict what parts will be printed and which will be stickers. Take the Legend Beasts as an example; the printed elements make the models look like animals [eyes etc.] and the stickers add extra detail. LEGO seem to want stickers to cover the non-essential decoration, and printed elements [some of which are really well printed these days] for the essential, 'as close as we can get to the final box image without printing everything' look.

I actually prefer this, you get some re-usable printed elements, if you don't apply the stickers the set still looks pretty good, and the costs are kept sensible by the optional stickers.

[Hrw-Amen]

LEGO Historian. What language is the sign you showed us with a pig head and the word slagter, I have to admit to a little sillyness at reading that and it raised my humour for a moment. But more seriously I assumed it meant butcher, but in Google translate it says it has detected it as Dutch, but there is no English translation available for it, that made me think maybe it is not butcher at all but some other obscure meaning like Pig Farmer for instance, but I don't Know as like I said it did not translate?

[L@go]

LEGO Historian. What language is the sign you showed us with a pig head and the word slagter, I have to admit to a little sillyness at reading that and it raised my humour for a moment. But more seriously I assumed it meant butcher, but in Google translate it says it has detected it as Dutch, but there is no English translation available for it, that made me think maybe it is not butcher at all but some other obscure meaning like Pig Farmer for instance, but I don't Know as like I said it did not translate?

It's Danish. And it does mean butcher.

[Legononymous]

Stickers should come on a clear backing. You shouldn't peel the sticker off the sheet but instead peel the backing off of the actual sticker. The clear area around the actual sticker would still have the backing which would allow you to properly line up the sticker.Or something along those lines.

[jonwil]

With regards to stickers peeling off, I have a 7739 Coast Guard Patrol Boat & Tower and the stickers on the orange boat hull are peeling off like crazy (and leaving little bits of white sticker stuff all over my hands when I pick it up etc) but all the other stickers from the same set have not suffered at all as far as I can tell.

[Toby Adams]

I have this old castle set (Where there where skeletons) and the stickers on the castle walls haven't even peeled even when the parts are in the Box Of Lego.

[Roger_Smith]

That set had a sticker sheet that had covered 8 train systems of central European nations (several of which are Swiss)...

How do you get 8 train systems? I only count 6 (Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany and Austria).

SBB and CFF is just one logo, of the swiss federal railways. Nowadays, they even adorn their rolling stock with "SBB CFF FFS" (see: http://upload.wikime...SBB_CFF_FFS.jpg). All three acronyms mean "Swiss federal railways" in the three principal languages spoken in Switzerland (german, french and italian).

Kinda curious that "Danske Statsbaner" (DSB) is absent.

Edited March 23, 2014 by Roger_Smith

[jonwil]

Later train sets included more logos including DSB

From that sheet I can identify German, Swiss, Dutch, Belgian, Swedish, French, Austrian, Norwegian, British, Finnish and Danish.

Seems like later in the life of 4.5v/12v trains LEGO was including the logos of all the rail companies from the major European countries they did a lot of business in.

Then for the 9v line (and going forward to the new 2014 train sets) they created the <-o-> logo as seen on this part:

http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=3008pb100

That new logo seems to have been created for much the same reasons LEGO created Octan (namely that they no longer wanted to use logos of real corporations on their products anymore)

[SalvoBrick]

The "FS" logo is the old one of the italian railways (back at the time was "Ferrovie dello Stato" = "State's railways")