Sometimes, certain questions keep you up at night. For me, it’s how much longer I have on this planet before something dreadful happens to me, because I’m a happy-go-lucky soul. For YouTuber Nate Scovill, however, the question burning a hole in his brain was much more straightforward: Which Lego hurts the most to step on?
Deciding there was nothing else for it but to get scientific, Scovill set to work building a test rig to find out (via Hackaday). Of course, they could have chosen to step on some Lego themselves to judge the results, but as they put it: “I didn’t want to show my feet on camera. If I’m going to end up on Wikifeet, it’s gonna be on my own terms.”
In fact, there’s a whole Wikifeet sideplot going on in this video, but I’ll let you watch it for yourselves to find out where that goes. We’re concerned with science here people, and so Scovill started out with a system capable of approximating his own weight, with an arm that would slam down upon the offending Lego brick with cardboard squares attached to the end to record a “gradient of damage.”
Initial results were promising. A little wizard’s hat delivered surprising amounts of penetration, thanks to its pointy top and stable base. However, nothing quite scared Scoville like an old Lego wheel, now out of production supposedly because of its potential danger to the underside of your feet.
On one side of the wheel is a metal axle, that when placed face up punched a hole into the cardboard test rig. Scoville also points out that the metal is prone to rusting, adding “toxic damage”.
However, Scoville didn’t stop there. A ballistics gel foot was created, inspired by Mythbuster’s judicious use of the material. Unfortunately, the zip ties on the end of the test rig ended up damaging the foot in unintended ways, meaning that Scoville was left with little choice but to put the foot on top of the Lego piece and slap down the bar.
Scientific method, destroyed. Well, not really. The ballistics gel foot proved massively vulnerable to the terrors of pointy Lego, leaving some embedded underneath in a way familiar to any of us that have jumped around the front room on a Sunday morning with a small piece of a child’s toy stuck in the bottom of our soles.
I’ll let you watch the video to see the eventual conclusion. Still, those of you not from the UK may be unaware of something even worse you can step on in a dark room: A standard issue upturned UK plug.
Just looking at that image makes me wince. Anyway, I salute you, Lego science extraordinaire. You’ve gone where others fear to tread.
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