All Sorted Ep 50: LEGO Brick Separator
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On a separate episode of All Sorted Jeff and James explore traditional methods of overcoming Clutch Power:
- Finger nails
- Potentially painful when the brick slips.
- Teeth
- Who doesn’t have a pile of old LEGO scarred with dental imprints?
- The corner of another piece of LEGO
- Increase chance of LEGO slippage = increased chance at knuckle pain.
- Butter knife
- If my parents ask, no it was not me that bent the tips on all those butter knives 20 years ago.
- Razor
- No… just no.
- Pliers
- Scars LEGO just like teeth, but with a much smaller chance of requiring emergency dental surgery.
- Dental floss
- Wait, does this actually work?
A Look at a Needed Tool
Part 6007: Brick Separator (1990)
- Appeared in only 69 sets over 21 years, such as 1666 – Brick Vac
- Brick Separator doesn’t even make the box cover.
- Scarcity lead some to take drastic action (via Reddit)
Brick Separator Becomes New and Improved
Part 96874: Brick and Axle Separator (2012)
Improvements included:
- Adding an axle-pusher to help remove Technic pins and axles.
- Thinning out the back of the handle to aid in prying off tiles.
- Adding an off-set jumper plate anti-stud to aid in removing stuck jumpers.
- Making this separator much easier to acquire. It has already appeared in 272 sets in less than 5 years!
We Get Lost Under a Flood of Extra Tools
Now that the tool is so easy to acquire, what is any self-respecting AFOL supposed to do with the surplus?
- Donate them to schools. Pack them up and give them out to local Kindergarten or grade 1 teachers.
- Involve them in intergalactic space warfare like Simon Liu did with his Vic-Separator.
- Blow them up, like dr_spock_888 did with his Death Star Grenades.
- Get some yard work done with them as dr_spock_888 also did, with his LEGO Brick Separator Grass Trimmer.
- Take a trip up north, like Eurobrick Forum member monsinjor’s Snowmobile MOC.
- Turn them into dragon flys, like Kristi did.
Finally, we ask
- Should LEGO slow down Brick Separator distribution?
- Should we somehow combine all our extra Brick Separators into some sort of massive super structure?
- Do you have a MOC that makes use of the Brick Separator? Let us know. Please leave a comment, or hit Jeff up on Twitter, he’s @StillSorting.
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