Designing a system of plastic bricks and pieces that can be assembled, stand up to semi-rough handling, and yet still be disassembled without too much effort is an art mastered by LEGO. It’s these qualities that put LEGO above many inferior copycats. But even this well-established toy brand has off days too. Since the start of 2018, there have been LEGO owners who have noticed that some bricks and building elements of a particular range of color have been, well, less robust than their fellows. They would either snap apart or crumble into fragments when tried to attach to another brick. And these primarily happen amongst reddish brown bricks.
What is it with these brown pieces that makes them so brittle? from lego
After a majority of the year without any announcement by LEGO about the problem of brittle, reddish brown bricks, the LEGO Group finally released their official statement addressing the oddities found in these LEGO pieces. Furthermore, they’ve also added that these quality issues are solved.
It’s possible that the issue didn’t escalate into something ugly because many owners who encountered the problematic reddish brown bricks were smart enough to go to LEGO Customer Service with their concerns, and received replacement bricks. The LEGO announcement not stating specific sets affected by inferior component bricks was also a positive step.
Anyway, here’s the LEGO announcement:
The LEGO Group has been working hard to address reported issues with Reddish Brown bricks becoming brittle and breaking under use.
The issues have been identified and we are happy to announce that they have been fixed.
The fixes were put in place earlier this year for the LEGO colours 154 (New Dark Red), 192 (Reddish Brown) and 308 (Dark Brown).
We waited until now to make the announcement, as we wanted to be 100% certain all issues had been addressed and fixed.
If you, at any time, have a LEGO element which doesn’t live up to the standard you’d expect from us – then please don’t hesitate to contact Customer Service and we will send you replacement parts.
We are terribly sorry for the inconveniences this has caused our loyal LEGO Fans across the World.
Image credit: Brickset
Yeah, happened to me with some pieces I got from a PaB wall, I think late 2017. I was sorting early this year (2018) and some of the 1 x 4 plates just snap easily when I pulled some apart from one another. Like 4 of them came apart. 2 also just snapped in half (very jagged edge) extremely easily without being connected.
The others from the same batch seem fine. Hopefully if I use them down the road they won’t collapse on me.
You still have not explained why they’re brittle