Lego are neat, fun, and incredibly durable. Long after our names have been forgotten and our ancestral bloodlines have been wiped out, their colorful plastic bodies will persist until the heat death of the universe. They also hurt like hell to step on in bare feet.
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Anyone who played with Lego as a kid (or still does) probably knows this first-hand. Anyone with kids who play with Lego definitely does. As a parent you don’t think that you’ll step on all the crap your fledgling spawn will leave all over the place, but what you don’t know prior to having kids is how braindead you’ll be most of the time just from having kids. But there are hundreds, possibly even thousands of unique Lego bricks. Which piece can cause the most damage?
That’s the question YouTuber Nate Scovill (via Hackaday) recently set out to answer using a mix of the scientific method and Mythbusters-inspired excess. Scovill crowdsourced info from Lego enthusiasts on Reddit and Discord to narrow down the most potentially painful pieces he should research and then used increasingly elaborate instruments to test them.
First, Scovill used a series of carboard squares pressed onto the Lego pieces in question to record their “gradient of damage” and used a constructed, weighted arm slapping down on the cardboard to simulate the weight of a foot press. Pointed flames, wizard hats, and retro plastic trees all did some of the worst damage.
Not content to judge using the cardboard alone, Scovill also decided to make an entire foot out of ballistic gel. This would record the damage in more detail, and also allow pieces to become lodged deep inside the material if the simulated accident went that poorly. So what Lego piece actually ended up being the most danagerous?
One you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a red wheel with a metal pin in it that Lego stopped producing long ago. Back before the company’s engineers and manufacturing processes were as high-tech and refined as they are today, there were some Lego pieces that actually relied on metal to complete the connection. These red wheels, if stepped on hard at just the right angle, bring more than a little Home Alone-style pain. Scovill remarks that you’d probably want to make sure your tetanus shots were up-to-date if you got nailed by one of them.
Fortunately for most of us, the pain of stepping on Lego can be exorcised with a few colorful expletives.
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