This telecasting shows something that very few people have had the chance to witness : the inside of the Lego manufacturing plant , with no barrier or secrets . I filmed every step in the creation of the brick . From the raw granulate salt away in monolithic silo to the moulding machines to the mammoth storage cathedrals to the ornamentation and packaging warehouses , you will be able-bodied to see utterly everything , including the most guarded arcanum of the company : the brick molds themselves .
While the storage areas are the most telling part of the factory , I have to admit that nothing had prepared me for the telescope and complexity that is required to make and pack 19 billion brick every twelvemonth . The shell of this factory , especially compared to the tiny bricks it produce , is perfectly breathtaking .
The warehouse and the mold room
We started in the main warehouse , which is half a kilometer long . Here they put up the silo harbor the raw plastic granulate . Through them , 60 tons of this material is process every 24 hours . These towers are connected to the moulding machines through a inner ear of vacuum tube that push the granulate mixtures in a permanent tin can - pitched rumble .
It ’s the digestive system of the tremendous factory , always feeding the model lines through the tubes and move big boxes full of pieces - using transporter bang - into the entrepot area in an endless and precise dancing which never ends : this factory shape around the clock to live up to the worldwide thirst for Lego .
The moulding machines
Everything is recycled in the factory . The plastic granulate itself is a by - mathematical product from diesel , and whatever is toss away in the manufacturing cognitive operation gets reprocess . The leftover parts from the mould - the plastic that fills the channels that take the hot credit card into the while disconfirming - fall down the automobile , gets ground up , and put back into the production cycle . Any other waste , like faulty pieces or the crystal clear plastic used to clean the intimate vacuum tube when they need to transfer the production coloring of a molding auto , are also ground up and sold to other companies for the product of other things , like pipes and even heating oil .
The machine produce more than two million pieces per 60 minutes , churning incessantly into color- and bar - coded boxes . I look around and I could n’t see many people . A woman was in one of those sempiternal aisle looking at a few moulding machines with self-aggrandizing “ QT ” signs on them . She was in charge of quality examination , crap sure that the production was go perfectly .
At one point I was occupy photos of a corner of full of yellow brick , and on the spur of the moment the auto stop work . dread I had done something wrong , I saw a big wonky box coming from the distance , some kind of weird transport with strange sensors on the top , directly from a wet farm on Tatooine or a spice mine in Dune . I tread back , instantly realizing it was one of the many factory automaton .
This transportation bot was answering the call of the central mainframe , the brains of the Lego body that ensure every aspect of the process at all time . The mainframes had stop the production of the machine , adopt the signal of the sensing element next to the box seat and sending the signal to the golem , alerting it that it had to reap the crop of brick . The robot go down the aisle autonomously , peck up boxes and forget empty ones so production can be resume .
The storage cathedrals, decoration and packaging
The robots then put the boxes in the conveyer , which move them into the storage cathedral ( click hereto see a complete report on them , the following TV only has a abbreviated sum-up ) . There , the Brobdingnagian cranebots come up them to the heavens , put them in endless tugboat of box . There are four of these cathedral in the Lego factory , and no humans are inner . The mainframes get it on what it is inside at all times , and order the cranebots to retrieve boxes and send them to decoration and publicity , where Lego sets take their final form .
https://gizmodo.com/65-foot-high-lego-cathedrals-store-19-billion-pieces-a-5019900
Here , the Lego piece may take two slipway . One is to go straight to the packaging line . The other is to go into decoration . Decoration is the most expensive part of the Lego process . Here , the pieces are individually painted with infrangible preciseness , like you may see in detail in this picture .
In the packaging lines the piece are distributed : they are underprice into the machine , which separates them one by one , then depend them using optical sensors , and placed in a generic modest box seat . I look on in amazement , encounter how the firearm fell into these small boxes on a very diminished conveyor . At every footmark , one , two , three or whatever amount of pieces will fall into the boxful , harmonise to the statement of the set in production .
Along the means , gamy preciseness scale evaluate the weight of the box . The computers sleep with exactly how much a box seat has to weigh at any microscope stage , indicating that the correct telephone number and kind of opus are inner . If there ’s a variant of a few micro - grams , the alarm jumps and an operator grabs the box , sorts the pieces , and puts the loge back into output .
Once the box is sodding , the message are dropped into the charge plate wrapping machine , which stimulate a purse with the piece inside . The box are then dropped inside another box , and passed into another production line , where more bags would be tally until all the set pieces are in place , quick to be package and sent to shops all around the universe .
As I watched the boxes go away , being wrap up for transportation , I could n’t help to have this feel of right-down marvel . From fictile cereal to full sets , everything controlled by computers and golem , in a exfoliation that - yield the size of most of these piece - stun me . Next clip you look at that Lego corner full of bricks , or your aggregation of mini - common fig , think about how complex and graceful the whole production process is . Your “ miniature ” will have then a entirely new dimension .
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