We have seen on the Lego Excavator an interesting thing about lego axles. In this episode, we will look in depth on this subject : the air bubbles in lego.
After discover air bubble in axle during the CT scanner of a lego Excavator #42006, I wanted to know if the air bubbles were present for a long time or only on this Excavator. Therefore I took from my collection several axles from several years, including those from my dark age, and starts CT-scan to look into. Here is the result in video :
Then, I can say the axle from lego is full of air bubbles. I do not think lego want to have air bubbles in the parts, it exists a molding process called Mucell in order to inject air bubble to reduce the cost of plastics material. But I do not think lego make that because the result is not very similar.
I think this air bubbles are a consequence of molding and injection point because on the axle of 5.5L, there are not air bubbles because the injection point is not the same. To finish, I think lego is aware about that for year ago (we can see it by cutting the axle, not only making X-ray scan), but as it doesn’t clearly affect the design or performance (a bit in torsion résistance), Lego do not care about it.
You can see HD picture and picture of the axle, which some of them, have many scratch !
Note : CT-scanner are from RX solutions, a french company who develop, design and manufacture CT-scanner.