How long does LEGO brick last? 37,112...

[Lego Otaku]

http://hackaday.com/...fespan-of-lego/

Someone cooked up a rig that tested LEGO brick to see how long it lasts before it loses clutch power.

How many times can you put two LEGO pieces together and take them apart again before they wear out? The answer is 37,112. At least that’s the number established by one test case. [Phillipe Cantin] was interested in this peculiar question so he built the test rig above to measure a LEGO’s lifespan.

The hacked together apparatus is pretty ingenious. It uses two servo motors for testing, each driven by the Arduino which is logging the count on an SD card. One of the two white LEGO parts has been screwed onto an arm of the upper servo. That servo presses down onto the mating piece which is sitting inside that yellow band. Look close and you’ll realize the yellow is the handle end of an IC puller. When the post on the lower servo is moved toward one arm of the puller it grips the lower LEGO piece tightly so that the upper servo can pull the two apart. In addition to the assembly and disassembly step there’s a verification step which raises the mated parts so that a reflectance sensor can verify that they’re holding together. [Phillipe] let the rig run for ten days straight before the pieces failed.

Don’t miss his video description of the project after the break.

Video at the source

[Jipay]

That's really strong ! Before cliping them 37112 times you've got to build quite some MOC's !

[JopieK]

interesting experiment :)

[Legogal]

Wow! That is a lot of action before brick failure occurred!

My fingers and hands are incredibly sore just from reading about this experiment. Sometimes my hands cramp from just an hour or two of hard pay with my bricks.

Maybe I need to do more planning before crunching these little suckers together....and then having to pull them apart so often.

(Someone's advice on this forum to avoid lotion and hand crime when working with bricks and raw, sore fingers is great advice as well.)

[Aanchir]

Very neat, although I have to wonder whether constant assembly and disassembly might put more stress on a brick than occasional assembly and disassembly. Perhaps if the machine were run at a lower speed it'd take more cycles for the bricks to lose clutch power.