Will improvements in 3D printing - cost and precision - impact LEGO in the future?
3D Printing and Impact on LEGO
ihbh on 23/11/2020 - 18:59
Comments
will take too long to print a whole box of them
Seems unlikely. Lego only has about 17 faulty pieces per 1 million pieces that they make. Tell me a bit more about the 3D printer. 🤔
What if lego falls out of favour is is replaced by a brick design that is suitable for at home printing?
Nah. The grey technic bushes split rate is 100%.
More likely to build a 3d printer out of Lego than a 3d printer putting Lego out of business
Perhaps one day you'll buy a Lego schematic and download and print the set… but not today.
58 minutes per brick. Then when it's done, doesn't fit because it got a bit of filament sticking out the side on the 3rd layer.
3D printing and injection moulding are not interchangeable processes.
Unless OP is alluding to 3D printing an injection moulder? But that's getting a bit meta…
Yes, my question boils down to will future improvements in 3D printing be equivalent to the injection moulding process used? Or, what future improvements in 3D printing is required to be equivalent to/replace injection moulding?
Injection moulding is extremely fast and very precise and repeatable. Also very low cost. All things 3d printing are not.
Yes, like industrialization vs craftsmanship (one-off). But in the future, there will come a time when they converge.
@ihbh: Probably not. 3d printing is cheaper for one off items, like at home. Also good for things that can't physically be made by injection moulding. It is time intensive. There is no advantage over injection moulding.
@ihbh: Still no. Injection moulding is practically engineered to produce Lego bricks consistently and cheaply. A more affordable Lego set is $0.1/brick. You think you can make something as high quality that doesn't immediately crumble for 20c? 50c? Or even a dollar? Even with a hypothetical, generational leap in 3D printing, it still won't approach the consistency of injection moulding, and Lego will still have its economy of scale to be more cost-effective.
Lego is literally the worst example you could have picked. What you should be asking is whether 3D printing will impact low volume, high value toys like the painted miniature market. If I was Games Workshop, I'd be very nervous about the pace of 3D printing.
Clones don't bother making quality molds and plastic. But as soon as 3D printers can print faithful lego bricks, people will buy the quality plastic themselves. Probably LEGO will sell it themselves eventually. It's possible eventually a 3D printed clone will be better than official lego one day.
Not any time soon. The manufacturing processes are too divergent. Home printers didn't kill off publishers and print shops, despite utilising the same technology (laser printing), a relatively small quality delta, and rock bottom pricing. 3D printing is much more complex, requiring specific ratios of filament, more consumables, takes much lower, and requires a lot of hand-holding. Even if you write off cost and time, injection moulding will always be quicker and better, and because of their economy of scale, Lego will also be cheaper.
If you think of the computer and tablet screen ad being home printing of page images, then it did kill of mass market printing.
If you're comparing digital screens to printing, then you might as well compare Lego bricks to Minecraft, rendering the OP's 3D printing question moot. The 'digital prophets' have been squawking about the paperless workplace since 2005 and we're still waiting. Kinko's and Officeworks are still very much in business.
@SydStrand: Good point, AR and VR games could supplant lego as the default building block experience for young people.
Even if 3D printing becomes something at the level of what Lego does (which I doubt due to what I have heard about the nature of 3d printing), that doesn't stop Lego from buying bunch of 3D printers and doing it in larger scale, and it'd be cheaper for them since they'd buy in bulk.
I do think what 3D printers excel in is in personalised? small modifications to designs. I wouldn't mind seeing 3D printed controller cases, mouse housing etc etc that is more catered for individuals.
As said above, the cost of 3D printing cannot compete with the cost of mass injection moulding. But it's not like Lego are selling to us at cost price. There's also their profit margin, licencing costs (which are very high for some sets), shipping, retailers margin etc etc. Given the ever increasing price of sets I could see a point where it is cheaper to 3D print a bootleg copy of a particular set rather than buy it. Sure it wouldn't have the same quality standard, but that doesn't seem to stop people buying bootleg copies of everything else.
I've tried 3D printing various lego bricks. This was before Lego's lawyers went through and got most of the designs on Thingiverse removed. I was just using PLA but could have used ABS for a stronger result. The clutch isn't the same but it was usually usable. I have some knockoff Lepin and that was far better quality than my 3D printed bricks. However, where I have found a use for 3D printing is printing a few parts that aren't available to buy. Fixed sections of train track also printed cheaper than buying them and the tolerances involved with train tracks are much more forgiving to 3D print. Plus my kids loved train track that wasn't grey for once.
Agree, there might be intermediate immediate benefits and then in the long term who knows. E.g. if the kids have lost and need a couple of pieces, it might be more sustainable for the environment to print them out rather than ship them from who knows where.
No.
Bootlegs have been around for quite a few years. Either the quality is questionable, or the other factor of "collectible" doesn't hold value. So yeah, nothing will change unless society's perception of Lego changes (and I wouldn't bank on that).