Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellboy
They should just put a single "peg" holder in the moulds for the backs of each torso. It would eliminate any need for a vest other than when something is required on the front.
The Kreo is plagued with QC issues. Missing parts, stress fractures on all the wrists and even half-melted pieces that obviously didn't pull from the mould properly. They don't hold like Lego and it feels cheap. It's not a good product but it's cheap enough to pick up (especially on clearance). Since Hasbro has simply ripped off Lego I keep waiting for Lego to make all the proper vehicles for their "City" line so that I can start making Lego combiners like Devastator. I see they already have a few "Triple Changers" in their Lego Creator line and one is very similar to Bulkhead in colour and bot mode.
It's only a matter of time....
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Missing Parts: To date I have only suffered one Kreon missing a part, one of the Vehicons from one of the Decepticon Ambush sets I bought was missing his head. None of the other Kreons have been missing anything.
Stress Fractures on all the Wrists: Admittedly there are a lot of Kreons with stress
marks around the wrists, the only one that has actually
fractured has been Megatron. This has nothing to do with the design of the Kreon in general, I believe it is more to do with the fact that the plastic consistency used in these particular areas are quite thin, and since a machine which has been regulated to a certain PSI is probably responsible for placing the hands into the arm sockets, any missallignement or cost cutting measures to ensure speedier production can cause problems, because a machine will push the hands into the arm sockets in quite a bit more forcefully than a person. (Provided of course a machine is actually responsible for this step of the production process. If it isn't the case I'd love to know how those factor workers could be stressing them all out that badly.)
Half-Melted Pieces that didn't pull from the mold properly: God that just sounds horrible, and to date I've only seen one culprit of this, my new Airachnid seems to have a piece like that. (Which is another reason why I'm interested in picking up an extra one.) Personally this is again a machine processing problem and not due to any other potential excuses. Someone at QC just missed it when it went through, these things have to be mass produced for a global market, the factories in China aren't regulated like LEGO Factories are, where care and quality assurance means that they take the time and effort to sift through every single piece to ensure proper quality.
Even LEGO isn't free of this vice though, as a few sets I've picked up over the years have suffered from cracking bricks and other pieces like small plates. They literally crack after being built into the model for a bit of while, my new City Park Cafe set is great, but one of the 1x1 Bricks has a crack in it, and it can't be from being too cold than heating up again.
Quite frankly I have not had any issues with my Kre-O sets. Although I will admit there are some pieces that tend to stress out a bit more than others, some of my transparent C-Clips broke when I dissassempled one of my Battleship sets for storage. Most unfortunate, but all-in-all Kre-O is a product on par with LEGO when it comes to quality of the bricks. They certainly don't feel as cheap as other knock off brands, such as Best Lock or Mega Blocks. (Hell I watched someone review a Best Lock Stargate set because I was curious about it and those bricks don't lock together at all, they had to use rubber cement to keep the model together.)
So Hasbro is in no way by far the worst offender when it comes to quality assurance for their products, we also have to remember that Kre-O as a brand name is currently where LEGO was at back in the late 70's early 80's, just starting out with only a few sets being made a year. They are still learning, I mean their last endevour with Brick Build toys was the Built-To-Rule line and those were utterly terrible compared to Kre-O. Give it time and I guarantee that Kre-O will correct these issues.
Already evidence points to the fact that they are trying to fix the issues of stressing on the figures. I'm not saying this as some staunch defender of Hasbro or anything, I'm merely saying this as a fan of both LEGO and Kre-O, and someone who can easily feel the similarity in the products quality compared to other similar clone brands.
