Dear visitor of this gallery! ***************************** Please let me clarify that I alsways have been a huge LEGO fan and I did not want to harm the brand and company by the content of this gallery. Most of the shown items are out of new bought sets of mine. Some other pictures have been sent to me by other fans (in that case a name appears within the file name). I reviewed the "quality"-gallery at brickshelf in late march 2004 and now I will try to give some more information about my view on the quality issues and try to tell where the specific elements came from. But first let me assure once again, that I always felt that the really high play value and the high level of quality as found at the LEGO bricks were outstanding as long as I can remember! I myself have never claimed about (too) high prices of LEGO. At least in the past, I felt they were worth every single penny (Sets in changed colours - as they have now appeared in early 2004 have no longer a worth to me.....). Nevertheless: over the last few years (at the same time when the play value of the LEGO sets decreased => "town junior") I had the dumb feeling that the quality of the bricks wasn't as high as known from the past. So I began to collect extreme examples. Those have been published in this specific gallery at brickshelf. As written: if the filename contains a name, I got these pictures from other fans around for publication purpose. The rest are out of my personal collection (of approx. 400000 bricks). All of them are out of sealed new boxes I bought (I think approx. 75% of my collection has been bought as new). That means I had a few dozen really "bad" bricks among maybe 300 000 new bricks, which is not so bad (in fact that is still very good!). But on the other hand I have the more vague feeling that the bricks do not fit as well as they used to do in the past. They look like they did since ever, but they have partly less (or too much) clutching force. I even have a few 1x1x1-bricks (round bricks and brick with technik pin hole), which have obviously conical studs. You cannot put these under other bricks. If you try, they pop out and fall to the ground. Obviously there are more of these kind of bricks in newer sets, which concerns me much more than a few totally mismoulded bricks. In Germany we call bricks like that "Kürbis-Steine" or "Kürbis-Qualität" ("pumpkin bricks"), since these mismatching bricks appeard first time massively in the orange S@H pumpkin set "3731" (2000). Another set with huge loads of bricks with (too) high form tolerances has been the "7171 mos espa podrace" (I own 8 copies of that set and all suffered under much lower quality, as usually known from LEGO). What I am talking about is best seen here (picture is linked from a gallery of John Neal): http://f24.parsimony.net/forum61776/messages/79069.htm Look at the side wall (and yes, I know that effect is partly caused by the strong light from behind, but still partly due to "bended" bricks.) ************** Concerning this gallery of mine: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=12182 ********* the basic bricks all came out of the blue tub "3033 (2000)" ********* the brown plate 1x8 is from the 5987 Dino Research Compound (2000) ******** The cypress trees are from the S@H set 10113 (2001) ******* the red fence is from train station 4556 (2002) ******* the green plates with differing height come from the outlet store Cologne "Pick-A-Brick-Wall" (late 2003) ******** The picture with the big gaps between the bricks are all from set 7171 (1999) ************ the strongly bended 28x6 train base is from the train spare set 3737 at S@H (and not mine) - at least 50% of all sets came like this, as fans mentioned in Lugnet! ********* The 1x6x2 arch in yellow is from set 4225 (ca 2000) ********* the white 1x1x5 is from 4532 level crossing (the only older brick which has a damage like this) *********************** Other pictures concern the sticker sheets of the Sopwith camel 3451 (2001 - first release in black and white printed box). Those stickers fall apart into tiny little parts that fly away after a while. Never had problems like that before. Only the Shell Ferrari 2556 has had a similar problem, but not that badly. Last picture of mine is the wheelblock of the Santa-Fe engine 10020. ALL OF THEM have been modified against the original mould which has been in use during the nineties. That is the reason why lots of them had a really poor running behaviour. http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=264039 LEGO employee Jake McKee informed us, this was a third party product and the supplier has already detected and solved this problem. *********** In conclusion I want to repeat. I am not concerned about a very few incompletely filled moulds and the damaged bricks due to that effect. But I am highly concerned about a general decrease in quality which is concerning a majority of bricks. Since bricks have thinner walls nowadays (in comparison to 60ies - 80ies), they can be moulded faster (and cheaper). But this might be dangerous and lead to wider tolerances, if the process is run wrong. Another topic in the field of quality would be the new purple potter knight bus, but I do better not start to talk about colours and mismatching colours - that would lead to the bad new-grey - old-grey discussion.... Regards, Ben ********** Ben(at)1000steine.com with (at)=@ of course p.s.: sub galleries deal with tolerances of shape and colour as released in years post 2004. P.p.s.: regarding the plates height, Jake McKee from Lego made this statement: http://news.lugnet.com/lego/?n=2139