#1481: HolloLego

Lego bricks (never ‘Legos’) have always been important in my life. I even built several working demo machines using them whilst at Imperial college, much to the irritation of the staff who didn’t understand creativity.

One annoying aspect though is the colours. The only way to get 10,000 pale grey bricks is to shell out a fortune and buy them individually -assuming the shade is even manufactured.

Today’s invention is a modification to the classic brick design. Each brick would be made so that the walls, which are currently solid, would be hollow. A huge number of say 4*4 bricks would be made in this way using transparent plastic and with one of the lugs on each a screw-in plug.

This would allow all bricks to be submerged in a tub of water-soluble, coloured dye. They would fill with colour and the screw lugs would be sealed.

In this way, one could build a massive sculpture in colours of one’s own choice (perhaps subtler than the stock ones).