LEGO (24 page)

The box then continues down the conveyor belt, where the pieces drop into a plastic wrapping machine. Once all the bags for a given set are collected, they are then inserted into the set box, which has just been folded by another employee. I keep wondering if some of the people I’m watching have put together any of the sets I have bought.

To meet the rising demand, LEGO opened a second production facility in 1988. Jan drives me over to the large warehouse and manufacturing plant, Kornmarken, which roughly translates to “rye fields.” The industrial area is named for fields and grains in homage to Billund’s beginnings as an agricultural village. Most of the sixteen hundred people who work at LEGO commute from other cities.

Three oversize bricks in primary colors lie at the entrance as if dropped by a giant child. I thought the first assembly plant was large, but Kornmarken is five hundred meters long, about a third of a mile. The floor of the fifty-two-thousand-square-meter facility is scuffed from feet and forklifts. The plastic granulate that will become LEGO bricks is stored in silos. Sixty tons are processed every twenty-four hours. A sound like faraway boulders tumbling in an avalanche accompanies the granulate as it travels along an intricate system of tubes to the molding machines.

Before I left for Denmark, I called Dave Sterling—it helps to know a plastics engineer. Dave’s first job was working in plastic product development, trying to find more efficient or heat-resistant plastic. His company has actually supplied LEGO with the glow-in-the-dark granules for specialty elements such as the castle ghost.

Dave dreams of working at LEGO as an engineer, dabbling in LEGO-ometry—short for LEGO geometry—the name given to the study of the production and tolerance of LEGO. The basic idea is to figure out how many parts you might be able to make from a batch of plastic granulate. In his mind, it is how LEGO approaches the plastic and molds that defines the company.

“What makes LEGO special is the quality—the combination of materials, properties, knowledge of mold design, and how they machine their own tools,” Dave told me.

All of the molds and machines have been built and maintained in Denmark. On average, LEGO discards only eighteen out of every million elements produced in Billund for failure to meet quality standards.

The material used to make LEGO pieces—acrylonitrile butadiene styrene—also is used to make everything from golf club heads to the plastic recorders you played in grade school. Each of the three chemical components lends a property that is associated with the little LEGO bricks. Acrylonitrile increases the surface hardness of plastic, helping to prevent scratches. Butadiene is a rubber, providing shape to the plastic. Styrene melts at a fairly low temperature, making the granules easier to process.

As Dave explained, “ABS has everything LEGO would want. It has good dimensional stability and can be molded to tight tolerances. It also has good fatigue and creep resistance, which is important because every time you flex a brick, it’s like stretching a rubber band. Eventually it breaks.”

The plastic granulate is heated to 235°C (455°F) until it melts inside a container that resembles an espresso machine. The heated mixture then drops via gravity to compress in the mold. Water is used to cool the plastic in eight to twelve seconds. The mold opens and the elements are pushed out onto a conveyor belt. The runners, the extra plastic outside the molded element, are cut into small pieces and recycled. Everything is automated to make sure the molds are completely filled and emptied at the right time.

“Tolerances are critical,” Dave told me, “because when you stack bricks up, your tolerance stacks with it. LEGO wants precision because otherwise the bricks from 1979 won’t work with the bricks from 1999.”

Technic pins and dwarf legs are being made side by side. The mold releases with a satisfying
pop,
punching out LEGO pieces by the dozen with the sound of an air rifle at the carnival. White and orange 1 × 4s fall into boxes. Endless numbers of dark green 2 × 4s roll down the conveyor belt.

“Do you know how much these are worth?” I ask Jan. He looks at me blankly. I resist the urge to run my fingers through the bin or fill my pockets. Dark green 2 × 4s go for as much as twenty-five cents apiece on BrickLink and, in front of my eyes, six hundred of them are pouring into a box per minute. It’s like watching the inner workings of a diamond cartel. Here are dark green bricks in abundance—a bin-full that no adult fan will ever possess. They will just be broken up according to the parts requirements of sets, meaning the secondary market will always be adjusting to what LEGO decides to produce.

I see only two employees working alongside the sixty-five machines here. One is pushing a broom to pick up the loose elements that have fallen to the floor, while another is doing quality testing of the bricks. The lack of people seems emblematic, as LEGO continues to move more manufacturing to the Czech Republic and Mexico to lower costs and to be closer to growing markets. In the beginning of the decade, LEGO employed four thousand people, roughly half the working population of Billund. That number dropped to sixteen hundred in 2009.

Robots circle the floor until summoned by sensors, exchanging an empty box for a full box of parts. The boxes then travel on conveyors to one of four storage towers. The number of red and yellow crates filled with LEGO is staggering.

The last stop on the tour is the mold warehouse. Molds are stacked on orange and steel shelves; Aksel estimates that LEGO has between six thousand and seven thousand molds, of which four thousand are currently active. Molds can potentially be filled five million times, and some have been in use for more than thirty years. Since it takes twelve weeks and up to $50,000 to make one mold, LEGO wants to get the most use out of each.

“What happens when a mold is done?” I ask Jan.

“We put them under the concrete in front to make sure that nobody will steal the molds,” says Jan. He’s smiling, but he’s not kidding.

I immediately think of Dan Brown, who has several prototype LEGO Darth Vader helmets—the test shots that never should have left the factory. Things have a way of sneaking out of factories, particularly as more manufacturing is outsourced to places that are less connected to LEGO than Billund. There’s clearly a market for rare LEGO ephemera. The last thing that LEGO needs is a competitor building from the same molds. It would be like the Treasury losing their bill plates.

After the two factory tours, I have a few more meetings and interviews with LEGO employees. As I depart corporate headquarters, I stamp my feet on my way out of the building. I’m testing for a hollow sound, hoping to locate a cache of buried molds. But the concrete is too thick. I can’t make out any difference in the sound of my stomps, and I walk away quickly before I get caught. It will be one of the few things I don’t confess to my wife. Searching for buried treasure is not as cool as I was led to believe in
The Goonies.

Inside the vault beneath the LEGO Idea House in Billund is Set 1082, the first set I ever owned—pieces of which are still in my collection.

I never expected to come face-to-face with my worst nightmare at LEGO headquarters, but there it is: a snarling red dragon—the namesake of the roller coaster at LEGOLAND. A 3-D model of the LEGO dragon is dissected into parts on the designer Jette Skovgaard Jensen’s computer monitor.

“That’s only the second roller coaster I’ve been on in my life. I’m a chicken,” I tell Jette as she walks me through how the model was built.

“I’m chicken too. I can’t look. But the challenge of something when it’s for LEGOLAND—we have to think about the whole family, like how to make it cool for a twelve-year-old and not too scary for a three-year-old,” says Jette. I ignore that I’m more than ten times the age she is trying not to scare.

She has the trendy glasses and spiky red hair of a designer in the 3-D Model Center. We’re at her desk inside Havremarken, the LEGO offices adjacent to the manufacturing plant. The building immediately makes me think of a Google campus, with employees on scooters whizzing by basketball hoops and table tennis tables in the hallways. The environment is certainly creative. A massively over-scaled red LEGO fire truck sits between cubicles, and nearly every employee’s workspace is decorated with a LEGO set or minifig.

I’m trying to get a sense of who the people are behind the brick creations I’ve been surrounded with for the past several days. Jette is a second-generation LEGO employee. She grew up in Billund, while her dad worked as a technician on the electronics and structural supports for the models that her mom glued.

“When I was a kid, I remember coming in the doors, it was very open. I thought I might leave Billund, but I was afraid. And here it was also easy to get a job once you are inside the company,” says Jette.

Today, her three children come with her on occasion to LEGO, eager to see her workspace, just as she wanted to follow her parents to work. Hearing about her family makes me think that working for LEGO is not that different from working for an American factory that comes to be synonymous with a small town. I could be in Elkhart, Indiana, finding out how recreational vehicles are made. LEGO just happens to have landed in Billund, defining the life of Jette’s family and thousands like her.

Jette began her career with LEGO as a window dresser in the exhibition department. For the past fifteen years, she has worked as a model designer. When she started designing models, the company was using “brick paper,” its own version of graph paper. In 1997, the company began to experiment with software programs for design, creating polygon models that could be morphed into bricks. Today she designs everything from park models to store displays. I mention that I’ve been bugging Kate about having some LEGO-filled lights in our house at home, threatening to build my own lamp.

“Well, it takes a couple of years to get the feeling of how it should look. Because it’s not just an artistic sense, but also a mathematical sense,” says Jette. This is her letting me down gently.

LEGO architectural drawing programs are readily available to the public. LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) is the 3-D modeling software that allows people to build creations on top of a piece of virtual graph paper. Through LEGO Factory, builders can even order the creations they have just designed, with all of the parts being shipped from LEGO. An open-source architectural program, LDraw, is also popular. The free computer-aided design software allows adult fans to render 3-D models and create building instructions for virtual sets. Many fans prefer LDraw because there are no limits to colors or bricks available, as opposed to LDD.

Jette walks me through the color palette she can choose from, noting that she has access to nearly every color of brick—although some are obviously more rare than others. Only a few elements have been done in gold, for instance, and the cost of a model made entirely from gold elements is not only exorbitant, it’s impractical.

Besides being paid to build, this is the perk of the job that most adult fans covet—a massive supply of LEGO. The designer is the kid on the playground with the most toys. Jette remembers the last time adult fans got a chance to visit the storeroom where bricks are kept.

“It was great to see because we are so used to that stuff that we could just go and pick whatever we want. And yet [adult fans] were just so happy to have a little bag of bricks. They grabbed the transparent bricks like they were gold,” she says.

Because my days here have been filled with interviews, I don’t have time to visit the storeroom and get my little bag of bricks. I’m more disappointed than I would have thought when it’s time to head back to the original LEGO campus on Systemvej. There I meet up again with Jan Christiansen, who leads me inside a stunningly white hallway, where stacks of white LEGO bricks sit beneath signs that proclaim THE JOY OF BUILDING and THE PRIDE OF CREATION. It feels like an Apple store, but it’s the entryway to the Idea House—the former home of Ole Kirk Christiansen, which has been transformed into a LEGO museum.

This is the second stop on my personal version of the LEGO Inside Tour. Since 2005, adult fans (and children with well-off parents) can pay $1,700 to tour the factory and the Idea House, as well as meet the designers. The Inside Tour is where you go on your honeymoon or for your fortieth birthday—the kind of trip that inspires the stories that your kids get sick of hearing. And I get to go for free.

Still, I didn’t expect my palms to be as sweaty as they are when I meet Jette Orduna, the director of the Idea House and the driving force behind the Inside Tour. Jette has the calm manners of a tour guide, gesturing gracefully with her arms to direct my attention to an object, and readily stopping her speech to address any of my questions.

“Are you a fan?” asks Jette.

“Yes,” I answer. It’s the first time I haven’t paused to consider my answer or immediately replied in the negative.