Try looking for Mould King or Cada - those are usually the ones that are considered to deliver great quality for a reasonable price.
It should be mentioned that both companies are gearing their products much more towards an older audience - so they aren’t really an alternative when talking about kids playsets.
I usually shop around on www.bluebrixx.com/en/ Their Specials didn’t disappoint so far. They carry other vendors too, but you might want to browse reviews on the web to see what’s really good. Quality does vary between vendors, but LEGO bricks aren’t as perfect as people believe either.
My kid got a non Lego set as a gift and what a letdown that was. It’s a frustrating excersise as the construction simply doesn’t holds up like the real thing.
Yeah, the tolerances are looser so it doesn’t click into place and stay in place easily. The plastic is less rigid and more pliable, making fitting even more difficult. The colors also fade more quickly.
I have a Mould King 13112 RC Excavator. All parts are on par and compatible with Lego bricks. Excellent quality, a bit tighter fit than regular Lego and the model itself is way more interesting and fun to build than anything Lego has produced in the Technic line in the past years. On top it is much cheaper than a comparable Lego set and it has an excellent building manual.
Apologies, I would recommend checking out www.bluebrixx.com/en/ to get an impression of what other vendors offer. You can look up the brands and models on your local Amazon, Alibaba, your local brick dealer, … These prices are a lot lower that LEGO sets, so you might be able to try different vendors and see what’s on the market.
I know, and I have loved Lego since getting that 8880 for Christmas that one year! But that is in the past, and spending 500€ on a LEGO set, when I can get a much more enjoyable experience from another vendor at a fraction of the cost, just doesn’t feel right to me these days. But to each their own, and I still love the LEGO sets I do have.
My homemade 3D printer that makes one of these rackus just because it’s not very good can make lego tolerance. It can’t cut metal though so I don’t know wtf he’s dreaming about lol.
The cybertronk looks highly regarded when put together correctly. Imagine if it has the panel gaps of other cars TSLA makes.
My tinfoil hat theory on why Elon is acting all right wing all of the sudden is to get those idiots to buy electric bare metal Pontiac Aztecs with “unbreakable” windows instead of F-150’s
I had exactly the same theory for 2. He seems to genuinely want to save humanity (reusable rockets, electric vehicles etc) and so converting right wingers to electric would fit the goal
This is what I was alluding to, however people seem to have jumped on the “oh he is an Elon fan, quick, tell him he is an idiot!” Rather than accepting nuance
“Had” is past tense. “Theory” is “a supposition or system of ideas indended to explain something”. I didn’t say that I thought that was the most likely theory. I thought lemmy was supposed to be able to hold a nuanced conversation?
Electric vehicles aren’t meant to save humanity. They are meant to save the car. If we removed all gas vehicles off the road right that wouldn’t even stop 30 percent of emissions. The only way to save humanity at this point is to stop capitalism. As long as we continue to expect the market to find a solution to a problem that has no profit motivator we will never save humanity. Elon included.
Ahem, if we removed all gas vehicles from the road right now, including farm vehicles, humanity would starve to death within a few months. Some subsistence farmers in developing countries that don’t need fertilizer would survive.
But it would definitely be the end of industrial society.
Emissions from transportation are a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, so it absolutely does make sense to decarbonize them. This isn’t really debatable. It’s been part of the ICC strategy and negotiations for decades now.
My tinfoil hat theory on why Elon is acting all right wing all of the sudden is to get those idiots to buy electric bare metal Pontiac Aztecs with “unbreakable” windows instead of F-150’s
can he recoup $44 billion tho…? it’s a bold move.meme
wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of logical explanation for his demented thrashings?
I don’t think he actually cares about the money he blew on Twitter. Money is a construct and that is even more true for rich people. If he cared about the money, he wouldn’t have tossed Twitter down the shitter.
I think he cares more about the impression he is making, whether it be good or bad. People are talking about Elon and that’s all that matters.
While I don’t know the cost to develop the cyber truck assuming it was 0 dollars to make the cost of the Twitter deal from cyber truck alone, it would take 88 thousand of them at elon getting 100% of the money from the sales. ( how he expects to sell an electric truck for 50k is beyond me)
100% everyone is making fun of teslas already, so imagine how the people feel who pre-ordered some garbage years ago. Now with their "leaked" email they can tell people how their future car will have toleraces that are on an qtomic level. These are also the prople who believed that teslas can fly in 3 years. Which was in 2016 i believe
My theory is he’s a wealthy dude, so he’s going to have right wing tendencies since the right wing benefits wealthy dudes.
Also, one of his kids came out as trans, he went nuts, blamed social media for making his kid a “degenerate”. Then bought twitter to destroy it out of revenge.
He’s kinda like a James Bond villain, but so much dumber.
LOL. At the same price as the Lightning, there’s no way this could compete with Ford. I thought the point of the sharp angles was to make the truck super cheap. If it was $25k, I’d consider getting it not caring about what it looked like (as long as it was warrantied for mechanical failures). Just for a cheap new truck to haul shit and not worry about getting beat up.
It’s almost like he hears about how bad the build quality of Tesla cars have become, so he thinks the solution is more accurrate, more expensive parts. Kind of like he has absolutely no clue what he’s doing, and doesn’t want to listen to smarter people telling him what they need.
At some point, once consumer rights are eroded enough , the straightest path to profits is just downright theft. Take money now, worry about product later. It’s literally inevitable and the video game industry is really fuckin good at it.
Just like Steve Jobs and every other “visionary” all he does is demand things, have his engineers and factory slaves do their thing, and then go on stage and act like he personally minted every single cybertruck by hand. Any asshole can do the job of a visionary, actually, being an asshole is the only required skill.
10 microns is .4 thou, about the width of a cotton fiber. Its possible to machine those tolerances, but very time consuming as machine maintainance steps up. Its also small enough that the thermal expansion of the sheets will be larger than that
So basically elon would rather dump money into expensive equipment to improve build quality than do the thing that’s actually needed to improve build quality and pay his workers what their work is worth and make their factory environment safer?
This is the kind of petty angry bullshit you have to do to be a billionaire. Its not about being smart, it’s about on some level hating everyone that isn’t you
You aren't going to hit that tolerance consistently on an assembly line no matter how much you pay. Can be done by a skilled machinist, but there are too many dynamical variables in an assembly line environment, like the previously mentioned thermal expansion.
It’s not even about that. You absolutely don’t need those tolerances for a cup holder. An assembly line will fuck it up regardless. You use tolerances like that when needed - in jet engines or turbines. Insisting on those numbers on a car is plain stupid - it isn’t better (other than the ego boosting “my car has high tolerances where nobody cares”) than just doing it like every other manufacturer does it. It’s a waste of money plain and simple.
For reference, in working with parts that interface directly with optical components about the tightest I’m ever comfortable specifying at production volumes is 0.05mm and that is for very specific dimensions and not entire parts yet he is demanding 5 times lower tolerances here.
What I meant is that Elon has set a fairly un-achievable standard, as the sheet metal parts he is talking about will grow and shrink by more than that depending on weather. Additionaly, the small parts can be machined to that tolerance, but only by a skilled machinist and not at assembly line levels.
Making a lot of assumptions about what he’s willing to put into this.
He’s not going to get fancy expensive new equipment, he’s not going to hire the best machinists, he’s not going to slow the work down to allow that kind of accuracy. He’s going to bluster and shout and make demands without providing any way of actually achieving those demands. That’s what Elon does. He’s not an Engineer, he doesn’t design things, he doesn’t build things, he tells people who actually know what they’re doing to build something. Here, he’s just saying “Do better” without anything more, and expecting that to be enough because he doesn’t actually know shit about dick.
Frankly the closest I’ve seen to evidence that Elon has ever actually designed anything is the eyesore that is the Cybertruck, because it absolutely looks like something that cretin would draw in crayon and demand be made a reality.
It’s design demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what trucks are for. I know people give the CEO of Ford shit for saying hes not worried about the Cybertruck because people who want to do real work wouldn’t take any interest in it, but its true. Trucks all have the shape of bed they do for a reason. Convergent product evolution landed on that as the best shape for a bed for trailer hitches
I mean… I literally bought a Ford Maverick because it was like a four door family car with the added bonus of a truck bed for many of the purposes I would have wanted a truck for.
Which just shows he has no idea how tolerances work. Small machined parts have different tolerances than large stamped parts. The key is setting the right tolerances for each part, designing the vehicle for desired gaps with those tolerances, and continuous improvement to fix and design out issues.
None at all. He also doesn’t understend that the issues tesla has faced are largely due to poor process design rather than automotive design. The plans may call for small gaps ore big gaps, but they certainly don’t call for iconsistent gaps
Imagine measuring door panels on a granite block in a climate controlled room, and sending it off to the surface grinder for rework. 🤣 Or sending the frame off to get scraped. Truly, this is the most idiotic idea on the planet and it’s all because he didn’t care about tolerances early on. His self own has turned into whatever the hell this crap was.
I know it’s supposed to make them sound good and might indeed be meant for leaking, but all I can think of is the demands on quality assurance and risks of failures down the road if such precision is paramount for the operation of the vehicle and assumed by the teams building it.
So give me a less finicky vehicle, please, and leave that precision for devices not subject to highly varying road conditions at very high speeds and housing people.
Tolerance/precision is all about choosing an appropriate one for the task, to achieve the desired results.
I’m not an automotive engineer, but nothing immediately jumps to mind on an automobile where this level of precision would be necessary, or indeed even desirable.
This just makes me think about the Vietnam war, where the far more precision engineered M16A1 was widely criticized for its unreliable performance in the harsh jungle environment, while the AK-47… built to whatever is the opposite of high precision and tight tolerance, was an absolute workhorse. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if there were still caches of dozens or even hundreds of AK-47s buried in the jungle since the mid 70s, that could be dug up and immediately used today.
“All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
LOL
Yeah ok.
Tell me you know nothing about manufacturing, without telling me you know nothing about manufacturing.
That one quote - assuming it is accurate - explains that Musk is even more of an idiot than everyone already knew he was. You don’t make things at those tight tolerances. A couple of dimensions on a part might be (for instance the bore on a press fit sleeve), but you’d almost never, ever hold an entire part to that tight of a tolerance.
In imperial units, 10 microns is .00039". A human hair is roughly .001 to .005" thick. So he is asking for a tolerance that is 3 to 10x smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To put the absurdity of Musk’s demand into perspective, most parts that go into a car are roughly an order of magnitude looser in tolerance with some dimensions being 2 orders of magnitude looser.
That difference might not sound like a lot, but holding something to +/-.0039 versus +/-.00039" could easily triple the price of an item or more. Easy. You use a tight tolerance only when you need to - that’s engineering 101. Some parts could easily be +/- .039" and not affect their performance on bit. Close tolerance engine parts might be held at what Musk is demanding, but never “ALL PARTS” would be held to that.
When I was young I got a job at a manufacturing place that made all sorts of parts for sensitive equipment. Younger people, or people with steady hands would debur and smooth. We would have these huge magnifiers and friggin microscopes and be working with what looked like a really long tiny exacto knives that needed to be replaced every 5 minutes or a couple dozen uses to get that stuff to spec. You can spend 20 minutes on a piece, think it’s perfect and then QC would send it right back because they somehow found some tiny inconsistency or groove you didn’t or couldn’t notice.
There is no way you can expect that level of accuracy, unless your willing to pay for clean room level stuff. Even we weren’t always quite that accurate depending on the end use and they charged like almost $50 for something that looked quite like something you get a hardware store for 50 cents.
I work in semiconductor industry where machines need to have sub-micron positioning accuracy and even we don’t generally design parts with 10 micron tolerances, unless it really needs to.
Not to mention the fact all the tolerances should have been determined before mass production began. You determine the dimensional requirements and develop the manufacturing process to deliver that.
There is absolutely no way they have the systems and tools in place to properly measure every part with sub 10-micron accuracy and precision either. To control those dimensions you need to go a whole additional order of magnitude out. I pity the fool that has to manage that control plan.
develop the manufacturing process to deliver that.
Exactly. I’m sure his engineers did the right thing and know what they are doing, and now the top executive steps his foot into the mix and will muck everything up.
I know exactly how the people that I have worked with in the past would have dealt with this - surrly engineers and quality managers who knew how to handle tough bosses. They would let the whole situation cool off for a day or two first. Then go tell him how much more expensive the truck would be if they tried to hold every dimension of every part to +/-.0004". Any sane CEO would quickly know he fucked up and issue some retract. If that still didn’t sway him because of his ego, we probably would stop even listening to him altogether. He has shown that he is utterly clues, so would he even know a part held to 10 microns versus one held to 100 or even 1000?? I’m guessing no. If he asked if these new parts were held to the tighter tolerance, we’d say yes and just go on about our day.
The whole Twitter fiasco suggests Tesla and SpaceX know exactly how to do this. Managing their idiot CEO is part of the training. Existing Twitter management didn’t know how to do that, and we haven’t seen the last of the consequences yet.
In many ways, it is their own fault for wanting to work for that clown. It’s not like it isn’t known that he is a terrible person and incompetent boss. We would get lots of fresh grads post up on the engineering subs on Reddit asking about jobs at Tesla. WTF? Why would you WANT to work there? We would try to talk sense into these people but few would ever listen.
Yes. The field is way too broad and has been for decades. I have all this knowledge in my head that I never get to use (integration of 1 over the square root of arctan squared of x cubed), knowledge that would have bern useful in the 1970s (this is how to build a class C amplifier without soldering), and knowledge that would have been useful but wasnt taught (this is what FLA is).
The ideal would be to break it up into a few different degrees. Guys and gals working in Software Defined Radio shouldn’t have the same training as those planning powerlines.
I lost it on an intern a while back who wanted to drop out because “we aren’t learning anything practical”. Yeah I know kid, get your piece of paper and get to work.
I’ve heard almost the exact same thing from MEs as well. Both are sooo broad. I mead I get WHY they try to teach you anything and everything, but it does seem overwhelming and at the same time seems like you haven’t learned anything useful even when you really have. You simply don’t know if you’ll be working at a nuclear power plant dealing with thermodynamics or a car maker mostly dealing with design or as a project manager at some other company dealing with vibrations. There’s just no way to know. The path your work life leads is impossible to predict so they sort of have to teach you a little about everything.
Nope. I might have been to harsh a bit. My sub-field (controls and automation) is notorious for being poorly documented and most of the tech being very vendor specific. So you learn on the job.
I am sure plenty of the semiconductor EEs will disagree with me.
Ah yeh, fair enough. I didn’t do any controls and am. Now having to learn a bit for my job, but I like learning at work. It’s more fun than university.
Really? I’d have thought EEs would learn it in the context of something like circuit breakers using bimetallic strips or the effect of heat-cycling on soldered joints.
As someone who knows almost nothing about the topic, wouldn’t some (most?) of these parts be big enough that a small change in temperature or air pressure alone would cause these parts to expand/shrink enough to go over the tolerance limit?
Thermal expansion of steel is .0000072" per degree F. All you would need is a 100 degree F temp change to blow that tolerance out of the water. And 100 degrees is not that much when it comes to cars. A freezing cold day versus a boiling hot day in the summer is a temperature swing more than 100 degrees. A ICE engine runs at roughly 250 degrees F so that right there would easily expand parts way more than the tolerance he is calling for. On an EV, I don’t think anything gets that hot, but the motors still get warm.
Yes, and different materials will have different rates of thermal expansion. That’s probably why the pixel 7 camera glass was cracking for no apparent reason when winter hit. Imagine coming out in the morning and finding all the glass in your car shattered because it got cold overnight. Or even worse you take it out of a heated garage on a cold day and the glass shatters while you’re driving.
We compensate for thermal expansion. The standard temperature things are measured at is 68F/20C. So if it’s 72 degrees we’ll compensate it back to 68 in software for the material we’re measuring. We use scale bars of known length and similar material type to verify scale. (I run laser trackers and laser radars.)
For measurement equipment that’s stationary, like CMMs, you just control the environment.
I’ve told many (usually new) design engineers that they’re stupid for asking for 0.001" tolerance on parts when they only need 0.005 “or 0.010”. The difference between 0.010" and sub-10 micron is easily a factor of 100 in most parts, ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
Unless you are talking about a press fit location or some kind of high precision alignment issue, almost nothing needs anything tighter than .001" and .005 or .010" is perfectly fine for most things. I work with a lot of weldments so if we’re within .030" we consider that good enough.
ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
not just that, he said “all parts”. The stitching on the seats, the floor carpets, USB ports, cupholders and the A/C vents have to be more accurate than the width of a human hair too
I don’t see anywhere in the article where Musk says “tolerance”. He specifically says “accuracy” and goes on the talk about listing more decimal places instead of rounding. Any mention of tolerance is done by the author of the article. If certain dimensions are not naturally rounded to one, or even two decimals, there is no reason not to list it to three or more on modern drawings. GD&T can specify whatever tolerance is necessary without relying on a decimal-based block tolerance. I’d be interested in seeing the original email but it seems like there is a misunderstanding by the author given the context being discussed.
I default to three decimal places for all my basic dimensions on both in and mm drawings. One of the benefits of GD&T is that you can give provide additional dimensional accuracy, completely independent of the tolerance being specified.
The linguistics of metrology is not exactly a topic I’m particularly passionate about, but if yiu look at the technical definition of accuracy, it essentially is the same as a tolerance.
Accuracy: the degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification conforms to the correct value or a standard.
And when it comes to decimal places, you’d never display more than you really need. If a dimension is +/- .010" there is absolutely no reason to display it to 4 decimal places. That doesn’t win you anything. More importantly, I’m sure a company like Tesla doesn’t even use drawings at all. I’m sure they are paperless and send out their models for machining.
I think there is a very important distinction between accuracy and tolerance in engineering. +/- .010" is not a dimension, but a tolerance that can be applied to a dimension. However if your example was changed to a .010" dimension, I would agree with you as I stated in my last comment. There is no need to give any further accuracy to that dimension if you are just adding zeros to the end (unless you are using block tolerances that rely on a specific number of digits to correspond with a standard tolerance). Unfortunately, not everything is designed using the same units and you will inevitably end up with a part designed in mm that uses a bolt-on component using a hole span in inches (for example, a nice round 1-in span). If you want a +/-1 mm tolerance on that part, you wouldn’t want to round every dimension to the nearest mm because you may end up with a tolerance of 24-26 mm when you really wanted 24.4 to 26.4 mm. I like to provide true dimensional accuracy (to microns or .0001" if I’m not just adding zeros) and then apply a suitable tolerance independently, using GD&T.
Regarding paperless manufacturing, I agree that many components are made straight from the models these days and imported directly into a CNC machine. However, there should always be a drawing or a digital equivalent a drawing. This is the contract that specifies acceptable tolerances to the manufacturer, and it will be used during QA inspection to determine if an acceptable part has been delivered.
I think there is an important distinction between accuracy and precision in engineering. I’m having flashbacks of sitting in class when the professor was going over this stuff. I honestly always found it some of the most boring topics in the curriculum.
One of my physics profs had a story about this. He needed two resistors to be very similar in performance for a circuit he was making, so he asked for a couple of the super-high-quality ones.
His advisor said “fuck that, get the 1% bin, they’ll be bimodal at 1% above and below rating, sort em and find two that match to the degree you need”
That’s kind of analogous; do you need to try to hit a particular value (accuracy) or do you need things in a consistent relation to one another (precision)?
Engine parts? Tesla’s don’t have engines, they have electric motors which shouldn’t need this level of precision. Electric motors they have today work pretty well already.
Can I ask a question that may sound snarky and snobby over internet text, but I’m genuinely and non-judgmentally curious about?
Where did this use of “aesthetic” come from? From context it appears to mean something different in your sentence (good “look” or style that is on trend and I like) than I understood it to mean (“look” or style referring to an encompassing cohesion instead of a qualitative assessment).
This language enthusiast is curious. Language changes and that’s cool, but this seems to confuse the term rather than disambiguate. Can you explain what you mean by it, and do you remember where you learned to use the word that way? Is it a regionalism?
On the whole, most products Lego builds are identical injection molded chunks of plastic, and not complicated cars filled with exotic materials like glass, steel and cobalt.
Only the hardest hitting journalism of the highest quality from Jalopnik. Who else would appreciate the difficulties encountered trying to incorporate exotic materials like glass and steel into a vehicle?
Why does Space Karen still have all his fanbois? Do they really think he’s some kind of software/technology/business genius, even after all that has come out about him?
I wouldn’t say I was a fanboy, but I liked him before … I don’t know, he was always crazy. These days he’s even more crazy and I’m not touching anything he does.
No clue what this reply is supposed to mean. Yes, crazy and racist are two different words. Yes, Elmo has gone on crazy and racist rants. Sometimes independently, sometimes together.
I think everyone just has a tiny bit of crazy in them, but they meet enough people to realise they need to temper their worst instincts.
The more rich/powerful you get, the more yes men you meet, and the more you think “hey i’m actually right all the time after all”, and the more you start justifying your own craziness.
Mate, it’s the opposite that’s true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
Starlink bandwidth is better than I was expecting.
I can’t find the video that did all the math, but basically by using a low Earth orbit network you can get information long distances faster than you can with cell towers and fiber because you’re significantly reducing the number of repeaters you need without significantly increasing the distance the information has to travel.
“Traditional” satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they’re the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I’m not a physics dude, so I don’t know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there’s a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn’t a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The “genius” of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn’t really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
Eh, not saying starlink isn’t good, but it’s not exactly novel. It didn’t take a genius to come up with the idea, which I very much doubt musk did, but the work that needed to be done and the service provided is impressive.
Musk did very little in that effort beyond paying the bill. I don’t really think that’s something to be commended for. Bill Gates could’ve paid for it and the result would have been identical.
Nah, he caught on late but he got it. He’s been out of the game for a long time, so people don’t remember when he was running MSFT. Guy was the real deal.
I’m definitely not praising Musk, I’m just saying that I’ve been really happy with my Starlink dish. I don’t like that I’m supporting him financially in this small way but it fits my needs too well.
wow that was a really interesting article. the only thing impressive thing elon musk has done is getting the smart people together to form spacex, and i sure hope its out of his hands at this point so he cant drive it into the ground.
yeah not adding a water deluge system like every other launchpad ever was an obvious mistake. the pad (and tower) were mostly fine though, it just destroyed the concrete directly under the engines.
personally i find it interesting to watch them messing around, but i dont really support them. if starship doesnt work out, oh well, it was cool to see them try (and fail) anyway.
Him and his companies have achieved some very impressive things, most notably Tesla being so far ahead of the pack with EV technology, and Space X with their reusable rockets.
Regardless of your opinion of him as a person, he has achieved some impressive things.
Add comment