What would go wrong with upscaling legos?
In: Engineering
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3d printing would cost more than this.
In some ways you can. I’ve seen precast concrete pieces that work in a similar way to connect to each other, but with grout or some sort of sealant in the joint as well to hold everything in place and prevent water from getting in the cracks.
For manufacturing large amounts of anything, there are much less expensive materials and processes to achieve that goal. 3d printing with plastic filament takes forever, and costs a shit ton.
3D printing is slow so for mass production you like to mould stuff just like you do with lego.
Plastic can be quite strong for small stuff but for large stuff, you start to notice that is is quite weak compared to other material. There is a reason you do not build houses in plastic.
Lego is held together by the friction from the extruding studs and it will not scale with the increased mass so comparably larger lego parts will not be held together as good as small.
The manufacturing tolerance is also quite small for lego. The moulds have to be accurate down to 20 micrometers and because of that, you need to replace them after a lot fewer users than other common plastic parts. Lego is one of the consumer plastic parts that is manufactured with the lowest tolerances
The molds cost a lot of money. This is why lego clones that exist on the market often do not stick together as lego does. they do not make good enough mold or they use them for longer so the dimension of the part is not correct.
But there are lego inspired parts to construct larger object but the are molded concrete block make do be stacked together. [http://m-konstruktor.com/data/uploads/lego-block-gal-2/lego-block-18.jpg](http://m-konstruktor.com/data/uploads/lego-block-gal-2/lego-block-18.jpg) So you can use them in situation where you in the past used to concrete or stone blocks.
Building a full sized house has been done with normal sized Lego bricks, 3.3 million of them. Part of a BBC TV series of doing ridiculously large projects with toys by James May (of the Top Gear motoring program)
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