Phillipe Cantin: LEGO's magic number is 37,112

Have you ever asked yourself this question: "How many times can I assemble LEGO bricks before they wear out?"

Well... probably never but I did.  The story would end there if I had not also the knack to build a machine to test it.  Here it is:

The first version was using a metal tube attaching the top servo to the LEGO brick.  It was too flimsy and died during initial testing.  So I took an old CPU heat sink...

And using my trusty angle cutter, I made this new arm:
A successful test proved that the LEGO was no match for this chunk of aluminium.  I then made an infra-red proximity sensor to detect if the presence of the LEGO and rigged the whole thing to an Arduino.  This was shot before the test started:

and this was shot about two thirds into the testing that lasted a whopping 10 days!!!

So here are the 2 dead LEGO bricks after 10 days and 37,112 assembling and disassembling.

Don't try this at home. It's long, noisy and cruel to LEGO bricks.

Some answers: