96.73 feet

While I have been on hiatus with tower building a new record was set in Vienna

Where Oh Where ... Can I Build a Tower

I know I haven't posted in a while, I've been busy putting together the pieces for my next Lego tower. I think I can make one over 30 ft tall. But where can I build it? It needs to be indoors because the thin pillar approach probably cannot take too much wind. It won't fit in my house at that height. Indoor places that are 30 ft tall are not that common. Atriums. Gymnasiums. Theaters. Are any of those places going to let me build a Lego tower? I don't know.

The ideal location would have sturdy place for me to stand and build every six feet or so. That is probably impossible but I have thought that a stairwell might work. The opening between the flights would have to be wide enough for the tower. Maybe just a big room like a gymnasium with a scissors lift, like this one.

If anyone has any specific ideas where I can build a 30 to 40 foot tower indoors, especially in the northwest Chicago suburbs, it would be great. Just post your idea as a comment.

New Corner Pillar Design

The tower I made back in October used 2x2 bricks stacked up for all the vertical pillars between layers. These are light and quite strong. The big problem with a stack of 2x2 is tipping. Even with some weight on them, they can be pushed sideways easily. I think I found a good solution to that problem. By using a different corner pillar design that has greater effective width I think it will be much less likely for individual pillars to tip over. The new design is still based on 2x2 bricks but every five layers a 1x6 is added in one direction. The next layer is another 1x6 at a 90 degree angle. This is repeated every five layers. At the other end of the 1x6s is a stack of 1x2s. Effectively each corner pillar is made up of three "sub" pillars a 2x2 in the middle and two 1x2 pillars at 90 degrees from each other. The three subpillars are joined into one piece by the 1x6 pieces. This structure is still very light which is important when a tower gets tall but is very stable in each of the two directions with the 1x2 subpillars. Since one of these new pillars is put in each corner, the overall structure seems much less likely to tip sideways at each level. I have a lot of 1x6 bricks but longer 1x bricks could be used like 1x8 or 1x10 for even more stability. This same approach could be used with the remaining pillars but I think it is unnecessary. The corners being less likely to tip seems to make the whole structure more stable.

Antenna

Tall buildings often have a slender antenna at the top. Inspired by that idea, I built a very light tower from Lego that could be put on top of any other solid tower. This one uses mostly 2x2 and 1x16 bricks. Three 2x2 stacks 30 bricks tall are connected up using two 1x16s. The groups are repeated eight times. It looks like an 'L' from above. What is amazing is that this simple approach resulted in a tower eight feet tall!

Slenderness Experiment

So how tall can a Lego tower be? Well it must depend on how wide it is. I decided to test some simple towers and see how tall I could make them before they collapsed. The first tower is made up of 1x1 bricks. I got it to 101 bricks tall before it fell. I tried this a couple of times and it always seemed to collapse just above 100 bricks. It was not steady way before then. 1x1 bricks just don't stack without curving all over the place. Using the 2.65 layers/inch approximation that is just over 38 inches tall. See the picture.

My next tower was 2x2. It is much more stable than the 1x1 towers and I was able to get it to 150 bricks tall before it leaned to far and collapsed. The entire tower leaned almost as a unit before collapsing. See the picture below.

The next tower had a 3x3 cross section. It was made of 1x3 and 2x3 bricks next to each other on each layer. I changed the orientation of them on each layer so it held together really well. It got to, you guessed it 200 layers tall. When I added another layer of 20 to the top it collapsed.

Finally, I made a tower with a 4x4 cross section using two 2x4 bricks for each layer. It got to 240 layers tall, less than the 250 layers I was expecting. This is over 90 inches tall, about 7.5 feet. No picture of the 3x3 or 4x4, sorry.


All of these towers suffered from lots of sway and curving. If you wanted to build a tower that could stand some vibration or wind probably would be a fraction of the collapse height. The pattern is intriguing, about 40 or 50 more layers for each additional "nib". Applying that formula for the 18 foot tower I made in October which was 38 nibs wide, it could have gone to about 50 feet tall. No way could I have made it to that height, it was swaying a lot already at 18 feet. Perhaps that should be the rule of thumb about 1/3 of the theoretical height assuming 40 layers per nib width. Given that, a stable 30 foot tower would need to be 72 nibs wide, a stable 50 foot tower would need to be 120 nibs wide, and a stable 100 foot tower would need to be 238 nibs wide. That would be a big tower, about 60 2x4 bricks on each edge.

Christmas was good to me

Having no hobby (like me) makes it difficult for those who want to buy Christmas/birthday gifts. Now that I'm trying to build Lego towers, the pent-up demand for a good gift for me has resulted in receiving many, many pounds of Legos for Christmas. After many hours of sorting and weighing I can finally report just how many Legos I have.

1x1 - 6594
1x2 - 11341
1x3 - 2307
1x4 - 5220
1x6 - 1598
1x8 - 738
2x2 - 8289
2x3 - 2875
2x4 - 6389

Over 45,000 bricks. An increase of 140% from the previous inventory. This does not even include the many special pieces I have. Including those, I have over 160 lbs of Legos.

So how tall of a tower could I build with all of this? I need to think about it but the last tower only used about 10,000 bricks and was almost 18 feet tall.

36 pounds on 2x2 pillar .. at least

Having done some googling and not finding much on the strength of Lego I decided I would so some testing myself. I built two thick square lego platforms and put 2x2 pillars in each corner 22 bricks tall. Then I started piling heavy stuff on top. I did this in my kitchen (sorry no pictures) so I used heavy stuff that was around the house. I started with some dumbell weights. Somewhat surprised that didn't collapse the pillars, I added a big box of cat food. Nothing. I added several five pound bags of sugar (we bake a lot). Nothing. Big Sams Club plastic container of kitty litter. Nothing. I had 144 pounds of weight on four 2x2 pillars. Each pillar was holding 36 pounds. At this point we started getting worried that if the pillars did fail the Lego pieces would be shot away at a high velocity and break something. How much could they have held? I don't know, I'm still very curious.