Lego Piece Views
Lego (trademarked in capitals as LEGO) is a line of construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects. The toys were originally designed in the 1940s in Europe and have achieved an international appeal, with an extensive subculture that supports Lego movies, games, video games, competitions, and four Lego themed amusement parks.
Lego pieces of all varieties are part of a universal system. Despite variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made in the current time, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.
Bricks, beams, axles, gears, mini figures, and all other parts in the Lego system are manufactured to an exacting degree of precision. When snapped together, pieces must have just the right amount of strength and flexibility mixed together to stick together. They must stay together until pulled apart. They cannot be too easily pulled apart, or the resulting constructions would be unstable; they also cannot be too difficult to pull apart, since the disassembly of one creation in order to build another is part of the Lego appeal. In order to have just the right clutch power , Lego elements are manufactured in molds made within a tolerance of 2 µm.[3]
Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Molding is done in Billund, Denmark, Nyíregyháza, Hungary and Monterrey, Mexico. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and Kladno in the Czech Republic. The Lego Group estimates that in the course of five decades it has produced some 400 billion Lego blocks.[9] Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 20 billion (2×1010) per year, or about 600 pieces per second: if all the Lego bricks ever produced were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62 Lego bricks.[10] According to an article in BusinessWeek in 2006, Lego could be considered the world's No. 1 tire manufacturer; the factory produces about 306 million tiny rubber tires a year.[11]
Lego Piece Images
