Actually in Spain we have Teide, a mountain taller than the Lego tower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teide
Oh yes, you do. You do indeed :)
What were we talking about again? Oh, LEGO. Bleh.
How tall can a Lego tower get?
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#32Is anyone else excited by the fact that your average Lego brick can easily hold a human's weight? So if you built things out of LEGO you could, at least in theory, stand on them.
As a parent, I really, really, really wish they'd collapse under a human's weight. That shit hurts.
Wear wooden shoes around the house? :) A Dutch woman told me that after you wear them for a year they start to get wear in and get comfortable.
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#33A friend and myself managed a slightly less epic 9.45m in 1989. We did it in the gap in the stairwell of our old flats. The base was only 8x8 and tapered every couple of meters and it was essentially hollow (to reduce weight and because we didn't want to run out of bits). We provided horizontal stabilisation with some string between the banisters to stop it falling during construction.
It was stopped by one of the whingy old fart neighbours wondering what we were doing and threatening to complain to the management company. We had a good 5m left and probably enough bits left to cover it!
Smashing it was awesome and made one hell of a mess which took hours to clear up.
Most of the Lego came from a car boot sale in two large bins and was purchased for a mere 5 GBP. Went on ebay in 2001 for nearly 200 GBP (good investment!)
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#34Speaking as an ex-aerospace-stress analyst, I found the article lacking. 2x2 Lego bricks individually fail by plastic deformation. The weight of an unreasonably tall tower could cause it, but we know that such an unreasonably tall tower can't exist because of stability concerns. So: what actually limits the height of a Lego tower? Elastic buckling, or some other kind of buckling, or is it something weird because of t…
As an ex-civil engineer, this would be an awesome, but expensive competition for freshman engineering students. I actually remember a problem set containing questions like "how tall a tower" ignoring things like stability for various materials.
Backing out some numbers from the piece, the 2x2 held 950 lbs, which is roughly 1000 lbs in 1/2"x1/2", or 4000psi. That's roughly the strength of ordinary unreinforced concrete, at a far lighter density. Legos are also similar to unreinforced concrete in their tensile strength, which is low, variable, and brittle. The usual calculation is that tensile strength is ~ 10% of the compressive strength for concrete, but it depends greatly on the cracks and other discontinuities.
From the problem set though, there's an interesting effect. If you taper the tower with an exponential curve, 1/e^x, the pressure on the bottom of the tower can be constant as you increase the both the footprint and the height. Not coincidentally, that's the same curve you find in towers in the real world like the Eiffel Tower and the CN Tower.
The ultimate height that you could make with a tower would certainly depend on what constraints you're applying. Is there a limited number of bricks? A limited base area? Any supports at all? How do the people actually assemble the thing? What safety regs are there?
With no constraints, I don't see a reason that legos couldn't be built to the height of the great pyramids. Apart from the obvious one that it would be hellaciously expensive.
Once you start talking about constraints and something more tower shaped than mountain shaped, stability is the biggest concern. Elastic stability will affect the tower, at least as an upper limit to the height/cross section ratio.
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#35Those resources could have been spent in something more useful.
I just wasted two hours. Doesn't that just drive you crazy?
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#36I'm a little confused. That's the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a "tower" that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it'd collapse after 3,591m. But that's not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more…
The original Reddit question was simply "How many Legos, stacked one on top of the other, would it take to destroy the bottom brick?"
I would be interested to see how much stronger the 2x2 flat pieces would be.
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#37Is anyone else excited by the fact that your average Lego brick can easily hold a human's weight? So if you built things out of LEGO you could, at least in theory, stand on them.
Unfortunately something else tends to go wrong first - so you can stand on a solid Lego structure fairly easily, but if you try to build a bridge it's very hard to keep it from failing when weighted in the middle because the weight tends to push the bricks apart from one another. There's an episode of James May's Toy Stories on Lego, where he builds a house from it; it turns out to be pretty tricky to build the floor…
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Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#38Is anyone else excited by the fact that your average Lego brick can easily hold a human's weight? So if you built things out of LEGO you could, at least in theory, stand on them.
Unfortunately something else tends to go wrong first - so you can stand on a solid Lego structure fairly easily, but if you try to build a bridge it's very hard to keep it from failing when weighted in the middle because the weight tends to push the bricks apart from one another. There's an episode of James May's Toy Stories on Lego, where he builds a house from it; it turns out to be pretty tricky to build the floor…
Don't they just give up and say that you can't build strong enough beams using Lego so they use a non lego structure?
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#39Wow, bbc is really hard up for news huh?
I really loved this quote:
'"... it's the typical height at which people ski in the Alps," Ian Johnston says (though many skiers also ski at lower altitudes).'
Really? I would never have guessed...
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#40Wow, bbc is really hard up for news huh? I really loved this quote: '"... it's the typical height at which people ski in the Alps," Ian Johnston says (though many skiers also ski at lower altitudes).' Really? I would never have guessed...
so is hn it seems. these days hn is becoming a day-delayed digg list.