9 ms·
How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?
- niggler 13y ago"It's long, noisy and cruel to LEGO bricks." Now I'm curious: how well do the lego knockoffs hold up?
- chris_mahan 13y agoFrom my experience, some of them don't even hold correctly on the first snap. To be fair, they were not MegaBlocks, but some other cheap brand.
- ktsmith 13y agoIn the last year I've probably put together 20-30 sets of various size (50 pieces to 1000 pieces) and some lego don't hold at all out of the box either. Lego is super easy to deal with for broken or missing pieces from sets which is the only reason it doesn't bother me too much.
- sramsay 13y agoI am so impressed by the mechanism used to hold and release the bottom piece -- it's an elegant, simple solution that fully demonstrates why I lack the talent to be a practical engineer.
- FrojoS 13y agoThis might motivate you to keep trying: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY What Ira Glass says is, that you get into something because you really like it and you have good taste. But for years, or decades, you're work will not be good enough to satisfy your good taste. Eventually though, this taste is what allows you to produce high quality work. But, you have to keep trying.
- sramsay 13y agoI've seen that. Isn't that marvelous? But in all honesty, I've experienced this in other areas of my life -- writing, programming, cooking, guitar playing -- and can attest to what he's saying.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoIt's not about talent, it's about practice. This isn't genius level engineering, it's competence and experience.
- nhebb 13y agoAgreed. I used to run a test lab for a company that made electrical cables and interconnects. We'd create fixtures all the time for specialized mate / demate tests. Most of the fixtures were created by technicians who had built up experience over time and got good at rigging them up quickly. You do need to have a tinkerer / puzzle solver type of mentality, though.
- hkmurakami 13y agoHad one of these guys at my previous employer. We called him the Jedi Master and regarded him with the utmost respect and awe. The guy could build anything from the scrappiest and unexpected of parts and appliances.
- bigiain 13y agoI remember at Burningman in maybe '03 or '04, there was this roller coaster with flamethrowers called "The Roaster Roaster" - a friend of mine (who's girlfriend ran straight into the queue to ride it) was asking one of the operators about it: "So, who designed and built this?" "Dave did!" "So who's Dave? Is he an engineer or a roller coaster designer in real life? How did he know how to build it safely?" "It's _Dave_ man! Dave can build _anything!_"
- hkmurakami 13y agoHahaha, well we were a chip company so the potential disaster scenarios weren't as pronounced. (though of of the NPI guys crushed his finger in one of the testers :()
- pcantin 13y ago(I'm the guy that built it): Totally true, I build a lot of stuff and the goal of this build was to make it work fast. In doing so I realized that I underestimated the strength needed to assemble and disassemble LEGO bricks. I actually planed to build a much better one using linear motion instead of rotation motion.
- martin-adams 13y agoAfter 4 days 6 hours it did 36,720 iterations. After 10 days it failed on 37,112 iterations. It takes 10 seconds per iteration. My calculations say it would have failed after 4 days and 7 hours. I wonder what happened to the other 5 and a half days. Very cool experiment. It's this type of testing that makes me feel reassured in mechanical engineering. It's about reassuring that a car air bag will work after years of inactivity, or a car seat belt buckle will not break under pressure in a collision. The only way to know is to test, test, test.
- tnorthcutt 13y agoAfter 4 days 6 hours it did 36,720 iterations. After 10 days it failed on 37,112 iterations. I noticed that inconsistency as well.
- acrooks 13y agoI think the 10 day figure included the time it took to build the machine.
- pcantin 13y agoI'm the guy that built it: During the tests, I had to guess the current count based on the estimate that one full iteration was about 10 seconds. This was not a good estimate and it made me overshot the actual number. When the test was finally over I was able to see on the SD-card the final 'real' total of 37,112. I'm making a new video explaining some of this.
- officialjunk 13y agoHonest question: do you think it matters that the bricks are attached with a radial motion rather than linear? From my personal usage, I tend to press all areas down at the same time rather than one side fully contacting before the other. I would imagine the wear is different between these two cases.
- pcantin 13y agoYou're right and this is why I intend to build a better rig. More answers in this new vid I just uploaded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLt8HkIOAuY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLt8HkIOAuY
- huhtenberg 13y agoAlternatively, don't use the bricks for 20-30 years and they will fail within a dozen assemblies. Plastic loses its elasticity so the older bricks just crack when are forced to connect. -- (edit) "Plastic" = "plastic used in Lego bricks that were included in Lego Space sets sold in the early 80s in Japan."
- kragen 13y ago"Plastic" is not one material, but many. Some degrade spontaneously over a timescale of a few decades; others don't. Is your statement a result of testing Legos, or a guess based on experience with other things, perhaps made from a different plastic? Chuck McManis above said his experience was that his 40+-year-old Legos work fine.
- huhtenberg 13y agoAdded the fine print. Better?
- kragen 13y agoMuch better, thanks!
- simcop2387 13y agoGiven that LEGO bricks are made of ABS plastic it very well could have had any number of formulations where some years it was weaker than others. Should be possible to test that.
- jacquesm 13y agoEarly bricks were cellulose acetate based.
- simcop2387 13y agoInteresting, The Wiki says up until 1963, didn't know they changed the formula at all. Be interesting to see how well ones from before and after the change held up comparably.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThat was such a fun read. I have wondered about this but never tried it. Strangely perhaps some Legos from my childhood still snap well (and they are like 40+ yrs old). Kinda makes you want to figure out how the formula changed over time.
- elob 13y agoI highly doubt you used any of your pieces 37000+ times. You are not comparing the right things.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI am sure I have not come close to 37,000 times. I have observed that Legos we got for our kids vs ones that we had from when we were kids, are different. I'm tempted to test both 'vintages'. I've also got some from the Lego Dacta catalog when we were building robots out of Legos using the MIT 6.270 build guides. They are slightly different too.
- ricardobeat 13y agoPlastic has got a lot better, remarkably in the past 20 years. The new ones are probably much more resilient. fond memories of disintegrating rubber and plastic from the 90s
- famousactress 13y agoMy first tech job was testing software at Hewlett Packard, circa '96-97. One of the projects I worked on was HP's first (I think) digital camera. The hardware testing was apparently running behind due to challenges the hardware team was having with abrasive qualities of some of the paints they'd chosen, and one day a bunch of us were asked to go help expedite some hardware tests. Every button, latch, and moveable part on that camera was rated to a certain number of presses and uses. A team of folks (which for one day that winter included myself) sat in a room pressing buttons and drawing notches on a sheet of paper until the product failed or qualified. It was kind of eye opening, actually. For weeks afterward I was nervous about whether the next button press on my tv remote was the last :) I'm curious, 16 years later.. How much of this testing is remains so manual? At HP I think the number of products and rate of change in early development made building fixtures to do this sort of thing pretty costly compared to low wage human testers.
- kragen 13y agoConsumer Reports has been doing automatic testing of this kind of thing for decades, so I assume not much.
- rtkwe 13y agoThis kind of testing is usually done mechanically now. Much higher repetition, reliable, and cheaper. This sounds like a last minute rush job.
- mzs 13y agoIt was automated in the early '80s at a manufacturer of switches intended for aerospace. I'm sure it was long before that. You would need to be Thor to press the roller switch used in landing gear for example. They even were under glass vacuum chambers so the testing could be simulated at various altitudes.
- potatolicious 13y agoRegular testing that you'd expect to do many times, and that's part of your product development process, is almost certainly automated. But one-off tests are still squarely in the territory of Ye Poor Intern. I remember interning at an auto parts plant years ago where I spent two whole days stuck in a windowless lab where I laser-measured the precise diameter of a batch of motor shafts because there was suspicion of a defect from the supplier. It's the sort of mind-numbing repetition and boredom that threatens to liquefy your brain, and to this day gives me a greater appreciation for how good I have it writing code for a living :) (the fact that I was using frickin' lasers to do my job was novel for only the first half hour) Certain parts of automated testing are still manual too. In the aforementioned plant I was responsible for going into the oven and making measurements every few hours and measuring hundreds of things as part of the heat-cold cycle testing, even though the actual temperature shifting and vibrational stress was fully computer-controlled. Good times. Glad I'm in software now.
- seivan 13y agoSeeing this want me to play with Arduino, not lego. I call this a success. Going to look into Arduino now. Thanks!
- hadem 13y agoI felt the opposite. Are you ever too old to play with Lego? :-)
- bigiain 13y agoWhen you get old enough, you get to play with Lego _and_ Arduino (way more fun than Mindstorm).
- learc83 13y agoYou can grab one at radio shack if you don't want to wait for shipping.
- Crake 13y agoI got an arduino Uno, it was about $20 on amazon! http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-UNO-board-DIP-ATmega328P/dp/B006H06TVG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366092550&sr=8-1&keywords=arduino+uno http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-UNO-board-DIP-ATmega328P/dp/B0...
- tragomaskhalos 13y agoRelated discussion about the durability of Lego posted a few months ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040545 PS: One of those strange and seemingly random usage differences between British and American English is the latter's use of a plural, "Legos" (or perhaps more accurate to say, use of the word "Lego" to denote "a Lego piece" with resultant plural), which is never used in the UK and always sounds odd to my ear (British Lego being like sheep ...)
- dsr_ 13y agoIt's LEGO-fan usage more than British/American difference. A fan always says "I play with LEGO, this is a LEGO brick, hand me some of that LEGO" whereas a casual user might say "Scoop up some of those LEGOs; I play with LEGOs."
- aardvark179 13y agoIt may be a fan usage thing in American English, but I've never heard any British person talk about LEGOs.
- octotoad 13y agoYeah, I've never heard anybody in Australia say "LEGOs". It's always been an American thing to me. Also, depending on the particular American accent involved, I often find the pronunciation quite unusual. Sounds more like "lay-goes" than "leh-goes", similar to the way some Americans pronounce the word "leg".
- gvb 13y agoLEGO(r) says it is "LEGO bricks", never "LEGOs". See the section Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/legal-notice/fair-play/ http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/legal-notice/fair-play/
- tibbon 13y agoHow many licks does it take to get to the middle of a tootsie pop?
- ricardobeat 13y ago3481 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+licks+does+it+take+to+get+to+the+middle+of+a+tootsie+pop%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+licks+does+it+...
- malkia 13y agoThis... is... QA!
- avn2109 13y agoIt would be interesting to see the cycles-to-failure distribution for these parts. I wonder if the textbook "bathtub" curve would appear even for such a simple piece.
- jdietrich 13y agoOne of my favourite sales gimmicks is the wooden butt at Ikea - the testing machine, displayed alongside the Poang chairs, endlessly "sitting" and "standing". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s_gyzshNPQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s_gyzshNPQ
- xmmx 13y agoWhy does everything have to be its own youtube video?
- pcantin 13y agoI made the front page of Make magazine blog... Yeah baby! http://blog.makezine.com/2013/04/17/stress-testing-lego/ http://blog.makezine.com/2013/04/17/stress-testing-lego/