LEGO Wants These Bricks Destroyed

Discover the scandalous history behind these marbled LEGO bricks!
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These special LEGO bricks may be beautiful but their history is quite the opposite. Behind these LEGO bricks is a rich history and countless stories of scandal, curiosity, and rebellion. LEGO absolutely despises these bricks but why? What caused their incredible marbling? And most notably, what does a tiny town in Scotland have to do with it? Well, settle in because it’s time to uncover the truth behind these marbled Grangemouth bricks, and why LEGO wants them destroyed.

Special thanks to Nathan Francis, Fantastic Brick, and Tom Gill on Flickr for sharing images of their Grangemouth brick collections.

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[SpitBrix]

This is one of my favorite video topics that I’ve ever worked on. An extensive amount of time went into researching, scripting, and editing this mini-documentary. If you enjoy, please support this video with a Like and consider Subscribing!

[Superabound]

Those red and yellow marbled bricks would be SO GOOD for lava

[KefkeWren]

Someone needs to teach LEGO the old gamedev addage, "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

[EmporerDragon]

"Mid to late 1900s"
Just have to go out of your way to make us feel ancient.

[mpeterll]

The best thing lego could do to kill the market for marbled bricks would be to simply sell them in small packs for a reasonable price. That would immediately wipe out their insane collector value.

[AmaroqStarwind]

We need to petition LEGO to acknowledge that people like these marbled bricks

[patrickdix]

On a similar note, the mystery flavored dumdum suckers are a result of the same thing. When they change flavors on the production line, a certain amount of the batch mixes between the flavors, and they know which section of the candy is the mixed flavor. Those get separated out and wrapped as the mystery flavor.

[Robin_The_Red_Rabbit]

You know what this could be an entire lego line called error bricks and all it IS just the same premise as how the Jelly Belly corporation gathers up all of the defect jelly bellies and then rebrands them as something else

[wastelander]

I lived in Maddiston, a couple miles away from Grangemouth. My best mate when I was a kid had a massive bucket of these. Core memory unlocked when I seen this picture.

[aaronlaughter]

Man, I am not into lego that much anymore, but if Lego decided to release a marbled set of nothing but marbled legos, I would buy them in a heartbeat.

[_marshP]

If Lego doesn't want these bricks in sets, one thing they could do is just turn any and all of the ones they find into keychains and sell them for quadruple the price.

[jakedoesyoutube]

I love the look of marble bricks, Lego really needs to realize that other people love them too. Lego sees them as mistakes, we see them as happy little accidents.

Also, I find it so weird that lego often buries their old molds. They could just be kept in a vault or storage room. That way, you could reuse the old models when needed.

[Zveebo]

I grew up in Edinburgh, just a short distance away from Grangemouth, and it really wasn’t that unusual when I was a kid to find various of these bricks in kids’ lego collections (especially when they had inherited older bricks from their parents). I remember one guy had about 20 or 30 different types. Crazy to think how much they are worth now – they just seemed like cool curiosities back then.

When I was a teenager, one of our school trips was to visit Grangemouth (which is a massive oil refinery, with lots of associated industries on site), and we saw where all the ABS pellets were produced. I never made the link so kind of cool to know the connection.

[proZach]

Lego should make marbled brick separators

[arfriedman]

The marbled bricks are a historical unauthorized mistake.

Lego should realize its a good marketing tool, getting more people interested in Lego leading to possible lego sales.

[SomethingBoutEclipse]

When you mentioned that company had a brick mold, I think that’s the reason why they now bury molds

[jonothanthrace]

These remind me of something my mom made when I was a kid called "scribble cookies": She'd take all the ends of my crayons, peel off the wrappers, put them in cupcake wrappers, and baked them in the oven until all the wax melted together. When they cooled off you'd have really cool rainbow crayons!

[zyxaqc]

LEGO should embrace these bricks and release special polybags of specific color combinations as either LEGO store exclusives or gifts with purchase. Imagine every month or two you could go into a LEGO store and get a little bag of beautiful marbled bricks along with your Star Wars or City set.

[pragmax]

I think these bricks were the inevitable outcome of R&D at Borg Warner. See the patterns on the short end of the bricks shown at 8:45. The marbling helps you see where the mold sprue connects and how the plastic flows into the mold. If you're testing many formulations of ABS in order to get this specific process right, this is probably the way to go as a solid color won't give you as much information. So, IMO, a lot of these marbled bricks are just R&D waste (that was thrifted into the hands of kids), rather than a deliberate rogue brick-making operation (although it became that in the end).

[richardperks]

These need to be made official. They would be perfect for the see like Ninjago and Dreamzzz!