<story><title>How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its &apos;clutch power&apos;?</title><url>http://phillipecantin.blogspot.com/2013/02/legos-magic-number-is-37112.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>famousactress</author><text>My first tech job was testing software at Hewlett Packard, circa &apos;96-97. One of the projects I worked on was HP&apos;s first (I think) digital camera. The hardware testing was apparently running behind due to challenges the hardware team was having with abrasive qualities of some of the paints they&apos;d chosen, and one day a bunch of us were asked to go help expedite some hardware tests.&lt;p&gt;Every button, latch, and moveable part on that camera was rated to a certain number of presses and uses. A team of folks (which for one day that winter included myself) sat in a room pressing buttons and drawing notches on a sheet of paper until the product failed or qualified. It was kind of eye opening, actually. For weeks afterward I was nervous about whether the next button press on my tv remote was the last :)&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m curious, 16 years later.. How much of this testing is remains so manual? At HP I think the number of products and rate of change in early development made building fixtures to do this sort of thing pretty costly compared to low wage human testers.</text></comment>
<story><title>How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its &apos;clutch power&apos;?</title><url>http://phillipecantin.blogspot.com/2013/02/legos-magic-number-is-37112.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>martin-adams</author><text>After 4 days 6 hours it did 36,720 iterations.
After 10 days it failed on 37,112 iterations.&lt;p&gt;It takes 10 seconds per iteration.  My calculations say it would have failed after 4 days and 7 hours.  I wonder what happened to the other 5 and a half days.&lt;p&gt;Very cool experiment.  It&apos;s this type of testing that makes me feel reassured in mechanical engineering.  It&apos;s about reassuring that a car air bag will work after years of inactivity, or a car seat belt buckle will not break under pressure in a collision.  The only way to know is to test, test, test.</text></comment>