All Sorted Ep 50: LEGO Brick Separator

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.