Rare LEGO items are often auctioned off on eBay, and here's one that claims to be straight off from the manufacturing lines of the most recently LEGO manufacturing facility that was officially opened the 25th of November 2016.
The LEGO piece is encased and can be seen in a milk-ish coloured 2 x 2 corner brick. Of all types of bricks that could be used, we can only speculate that this particular brick has the mold on the manufacturing lines ready to go and by whatever processes that decided it was the block of mold to be used for the test runs.
Upon closer inspection, there's a 33 engraved onto the side of the element, thus there must be a certain number of pieces out there that we'll never know of.
What's that colour?
One thing that stands out is that weird colour. What colour is that brick and why is it in that colour? First and foremost, this is simply our speculation and educated guess. The plastic that LEGO is made from is called ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) and raw granules that are fed into the LEGO making machine, well, come in that milk-ish colour. We googled the below and found some of them in this colour amongst others. So it seems that the test runs were with raw/non-coloured granules made into LEGO blocks.
What's with the date?
Eagle-eyed readers may notice that the factory opened on the 25th of November 2016, but the brick is labelled July 17th 2015, So it's our guess that the factory officially opened in 2016, with the usual fanfare, but testing was done months earlier during the setup of the facilities. Sounds very logical from our point of view.
Listing information
Here's a screenshot of the eBay listing. Although it was listed as USD 250, the final update was it was not sold to our knowledge. At time of writing the listing had zero bids and this noticed was shown: This listing was ended by the seller because there was an error in the listing.
It was listed with the following description
This is a completely rare item.
I used to work for The LEGO Group - at one point building the factory in Jiaxing, China - for that we were given a special gift.
This is brick number 33 ever produced at the LEGO factory in China. Completely rare. An item that has never been sold in stores etc.
With LEGO popularity on the rise, any unique item will hold a price to the willing buyer. It's nevertheless interesting for us to see them and here at Brick Hello, we will continue to watch closely in this space and report any interesting finds we catch.