Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/15/lego-makes-short-work-of-steel.html
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6 Likes
Plastic - it will fuck you up!
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“short” work
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WOW, would not have guessed this outcome. I guess: Science, bitches!
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I’m not surprised that there was a gear arrangement that provided enough mechanical advantage to rule the day; you can get more or less arbitrary amounts of that limited only by your patience and keeping the friction low enough that your motor can still overcome it.
What was surprising, and impressive, was how long the parts of the lego that actually did the direct contact with the axle held up.
They eventually failed; but the only way this worked was by having a few little plastic nubs endure better than the axle did. I would have expected them to deform or shear off much earlier; and then the arrangement to rotate merrily without actually doing any further work on the axle.
In summary and conclusion, the little axle interface nubs are the heroes of this documentary.
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Aw, is she getting married? 
No. I know. It’s much worse than that. 
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I think sticking it to a base would have decreased how much the rig twisted.
…although he did end up using 4 of them to 1 axle.
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(sigma*)=F / mm²
…and that’s all the science it takes. Steel, not quite incidentially, is usually sold by profile, ton, quality and, first of all, stiffness (sigma). So it’s pretty easy to predict when it will bend or break. Because not doing so is what it is good for.
*I am not going to find out where in the world this Greek character might be on my keyboard. It stands for tension, anyway. F by the way is force in Newton, just to have it mentioned.
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I hope that LEGO set comes with safety glasses.
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An apt concern, given your user name.
“Gentlemen, engage your safety squints.”
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“Give me enough Lego pieces and a place to stand (probably somewhere in the Oort cloud), and I will move the earth.”
UPDATE: I have obtained proof that rogue mathematician and alleged time-traveller Anarchimedes is constructing a LEGO Doomsday Weapon:
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The most recent Lego Masters installment had a weight bearing bridge challange.
Spoiler: the teams that used a whole bunch of plastic in their build, did really well. The ones who tried to be efficient and clever, not so much.
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Rather than dig through the character mapper on my OS, I just search for (eg) “sigma symbol”, and then just copy/paste from the results. So here you go, I assume you want the lower case one?
σ
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Look, ma! I made a drill bit!
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Stainless steel is not that strong in terms of metals. If this was made of a hardened tool steel the plastic gears wouldn’t hold up at all.
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Well yeah, no shit. That’s like not being impress your bullet punched through a steel plate because it would just bounce off a hardened steel plate. Of course something would fail eventually if you got a bigger, tougher object.
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Well yeah shit. A lot of average people see something like this and think how impressively strong the Lego plastic is. When in reality the choice of metal makes more of a difference between it and the plastic strength. Stainless steel seems over priced in this application. Even a slighlty hardened mild steel with an oxide finish would be fine for most applications. My Construx toys from the 80’s had metal axles, but they used a single groove engagement and a rubber pulley drive system. The metal just allowed the shafts to be small enough to pass through the connectors.
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