Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/16/watch-lego-minifigures-being-b.html
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I was hoping the factory would also be made of Lego.
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No Lego’s were harmed during the filming…
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"Watch Lego minifigures being born"
Less messy than I had imagined.
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6:55
Someone’s gonna get a minifig without an arm 
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4:50
Heads will roll!
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This isn’t minifigures being born, this is minifigures getting tattooed.
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If you’re interested in how the pieces were made in the first place, there’s always this fascinating summary of the history and modern implementation of plastic injection molding, by Bill the Engineer Guy. It’s worth the watch.
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They seem to have a lot of machinery devoted to carefully funnelling pieces into alignment jigs, only to throw them all back into a big box after each step. Surely once you’ve got the torso onto a jig for the tattoos, you’d also add the hands, heads, etc, while it’s still on the jig? Or is it because they produce so many different combinations of the pieces, it’s easier to separate all the stages completely?
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I think you’ve nailed it. Different prints, different color hands, arms/legs a different color from the torso/pelvis. They need to separate the processes to accommodate all the combinations.
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I bet you’re right…plus maybe the parts get inspected before being assembled into the full figures? That way there would be less waste, compared to rejecting a whole figure at the end of the process because of one bad part. (Then again, loss of a minifig wouldn’t be a huge loss…but then again, it all adds up…)
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I love good factory videos like this one. But now I want to see videos on the people who make factories. How do you design this kind of equipment, that has to work reliably day in and day out?
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One thing that I notice about the machinery in these factories is that it’s all very expensive looking. dozens of duplicates of mechanisms that have every surface precision-machined, and every aspect of their operation is thoroughly studied and optimized. Compared to my work in a big telescope, where we have one or two of each thing, and they sometimes look like they got reworked a few times.
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I used to design systems like this. It’s actually really cool, figuring out how to break the fabrication of a thing down into discrete steps that can be achieved through your suite of really quite simple individual processes.
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“Minifigurkey” is an awesome word.
But when all those white pieces rattled down the drain in the beginning, all I could think about was the Tooth Child …
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Fun fact (from the LEGO museum in Billund, Denmark)… LEGO used to be so fanatical about not letting their worn out molds and dies get into the hands of cheap knock-off competitors, they would bury them in concrete in the factory floor whenever they built an extension to the factory!
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I’d have thought it would be more fitting for the minfig bits to get added to the kits unassembled, and leave it to the customer to put them together?
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I was thinking that as well, but those particular parts have to be assembled with a lot of force, so that they don’t fall off in use. Minifigs aren’t exactly LEGOs in that sense.
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Maybe this calls for a redesign of the minifigs, then? Something to make it easier to swap the arms and legs around to give kids more options?
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