A floor peppered with Lego pieces is a midnight minefield for barefoot parents, but a YouTuber going by "Unnecessary Inventions" has now designed a 3D-printed Shop Vac attachment that allows you to vacuum up lego and have it auto-sorted by size.
Matty Benedetto has made a social media star out of himself with his habit of "solving problems that don't really exist by creating products that no-one is asking for." But every now and then, among the reverse headphones that let you relax in near-silence while blasting music at everyone around you, and the multi-axis head-mounted gimbals designed to let you watch movies on your phone while you're jogging, he misses the mark and accidentally invents something that might be useful.
Such a mistake is the Lego-sorting vacuum attachment, inspired by a bit from The Office. It's a series of magnetically snap-locking cylinders, with filter discs in between designed to let the smallest pieces filter right through to the bottom, and the larger ones to settle in size-differentiated layers. So when you're faced with a floor full of loose bricks, you can just suck 'em up.
There are definitely people out there that sort their Lego bricks, and I'm not here to judge those people. But I would point out a couple of apparent issues with Benedetto's approach. Firstly, he hasn't designed a vacuum head; he's got to painstakingly go over the floor with the open nozzle. It looks like it takes ages, and he freely admits that he's stepped on more Lego making this video than at any other time in his life.
Secondly, how to put this delicately... this experiment seems badly in need of peer review, because toward the end of the video, he shows his progress with some nicely sorted pieces, and some of the ones in the top tier of the filter are way too big to fit down the hose. We call shenanigans!
What's more, there's no agitation method beyond the suction of the vacuum. That's going to affect the accuracy of your results, and if you're the sort of person that sorts your Lego, that kind of thing will probably be important to you.
Still, it's good fun stuff, and one thing you can certainly say about Benedetto is that he puts in the 99 percent perspiration, no matter how terrible the 1 percent inspiration is behind these inventions. Enjoy the video below. Trigger warning: mustache.
Source: Unneccessary Inventions
