Well, bricks and plates, and tiles and panels and slopes, and grills and pegs and legs.

To put it another way, this video is about Legos, many of which are bricks, and some of which, I recently learned, are babies.

I also learned that Lego sets, like this RV one I made my writer build for educational purposes, are beholden to tons of design and engineering rules that dictate how you, the user, are allowed to put the pieces together.

So, come along as we look into how Lego sets get designed, some of the building techniques they will never ever use, and why every Lego set gets put in an oven before they send it to market.

A Lego set begins its life as an idea, or more accurately, as a price point.

The Lego design team is divided into two themes.

Think Star Wars, City, Rail Bricks, and so on.

And twice a year, each theme gets a number of sets to design and price points those sets should retail for when they drop.

Generally, one designer gets assigned to each set, and decides where, to put it simply, all the bricks will go.

Later, others will take up writing the instructions, graphic designing stickers and or packaging, creating any new pieces or elements unique to the set, etc.

The designer starts with IRL Legos from a massive library at HQ, featuring buckets of every single piece ever featured in a set.

The goal is to build the model mostly, if not entirely, out of these pre-existing pieces.

After all, designing and producing new pieces is difficult, expensive, and not worth it in any situation where they could make something similar or better out of the over 4,000 Lego pieces already at their disposal.

Designers often start by building a rough first draft of their creation to get a sense of the size and scale, then go part by part, filling in exactly what the pieces, techniques, and fun little bonus details like these little doors or this battery will be.

But why start from real pieces?

Don't they have CAD in Denmark?

Well, yes, but if you build with simulated Legos, you won't get a sense of how weight, stability, or how much of a pain it is to put something together are affecting the final model or your experience building it.

A digital version usually only gets made once the designer has built a model they're happy with, mostly so that, and this is true, if a prototype model falls off a table or something, it doesn't become the Library of Alexandria.

They can just fix it up.

Now, when it comes to what pieces and techniques the set will ask you to use, designers follow certain principles that help guarantee it's sturdy and stable.

Some are obvious, like having you build a large base below a heavier set like the Coliseum.

Another obvious one is brick staggering.

Since most Legos only connect to each other vertically via these studs, more on that later, you have to use pieces in the rows above and below to connect things horizontally.

See, this part of the RV.

These two pieces aren't touching here, but these pieces are holding them together.

Now, what Amy's got here is an official Lego set, and, at least for now, she's building it according to the designer's instructions.

This rulebook will only include what, in Legoland, are called legal building techniques, i.e. techniques that will result in a sturdy, durable RV at the end, and, critically, that won't deform any of the Legos involved in making this.

Because much of the point of Legos is that any piece from any set will fit any other Lego, and you can infinitely build and rebuild things with whatever you've got.

The Legos are plastic at the end of the day, which means they can deform if not used correctly.

And if you deform a Lego, it won't fit with the others anymore.

How do I know?

Experiments.

All this to say, most illegal moves either deform the bricks, create an unstable build, or have illicit substances stashed inside.

And to understand what makes them illegal, we have to know just a little more about Legos pieces.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of Legos.

System pieces and technique pieces.

System pieces are the classics.

These guys.

You connect them via their studs, and they look nice.

This one, surprise surprise, is a brick.

This is a plate.

Three plates is the same height as a brick, five plates is the same width as two studs.

This is very important, but only applies to standard system Legos.

But let's have a look at the three.

These are technique pieces, which connect via pins through their various holes, rather than studs.

They're better for building stuff like our RV's wheels.

Stuff that moves.

Amy tried to fashion a wheel out of system bricks, and, well, it wasn't very smooth.

When you watch some oddly satisfying video of someone building some Lego machine that, like, makes an infinite domino fall or something, that'll be mostly technique pieces.

On a system brick, the middle of the stud is 3.92 millimeters from the top.

In a technique one, the center of the hole that stud could go into is 3.8 millimeters from the top.

A gaping .12 millimeter distance.

Almost big enough for an amoeba proteus to slip through.

Almost.

That means that when you put them together, they don't line up, which would make doing this illegal, as it's putting excess force on this part of the Lego, which would deform it over time.

Also illegal?

This.

Because, though it may look like this lines up all nice, the word Lego embossed on the top of each of these studs is .14 millimeters tall, meaning this brick is getting constant, potentially deforming pressure on it.

Illegal!

Jail!

Also, the ends of technique bricks' holes are larger than the middle, so if you put a peg in there, you have to push it until it makes this little snap sound.

Otherwise, you'll be compressing the end of the peg stuck in the narrow part of the hole, which will deform it if you leave it there long enough.

Perhaps the most classic illegal Lego technique is this, which will have you serving 42 life in Lego prison, which is pretty easy to escape from, but I digress.

This looks legal, so much so that in the past, official Lego sets have had people do this.

But alas, the gap between the studs is slightly smaller than the width of a plate, meaning this will compress your plate out of shape if you leave it there.

But not all of the illegal moves are about measurements.

Some are about materials.

These translucent pieces, among others, are made of polycarbonate, a different type of plastic than the normal bricks.

Polycarbonates generate a lot of friction with themselves, which is no biggie if you're connecting them stud to stud like this, but you can't put a polycarbonate peg through a polycarbonate hole, because that friction will make them near impossible to pull apart.

That's also kind of why sticking this cone-shaped piece into a tube is illegal.

Without a way to know it's clicked into place, you could push it too far and get it stuck forever.

Of course, the Lego group can't actually stop you from doing an illegal build, which is why Amy made this.

But they do consider it their responsibility to never tell you to deform their pieces, or do anything that will get them permanently stuck together.

The goal in all of this, besides keeping your pieces in reusable condition, is to make sure that your build is sturdy enough not to fall apart.

Not while you're building it, not when you put it on your shelf, not when it gets a little too much sunlight on your windowsill, and not, and I mean this, when you accidentally put it in the oven.

And yes, the last stage of a set's design and approval, and we've skipped a lot of steps to be clear, but time is of the essence here, is called the heat test.

The point where they make sure the build model can withstand years of weathering.

And they do this by literally putting the model in an industrial oven, and making sure it holds up.

If it does, it's headed to the shelves, where hopefully some good-natured builder will snap it up and build it in the way God and Lego intended.

You know, instead of doing any of Amy's disgusting experiments.

I had nothing to do with that.

Don't send me to Lego jail.

But you know what I do have something to do with?

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