Genius inventor makes The Office's vacuum toy collector a reality, uses it to suck up and sort Lego

Matty Benedetto, host of YouTube channel Unnecessary Inventions, has been waging a noble war against Lego-related injuries. In the past, he created a pair of bespoke “Lego socks” that allow wearers to avoid hurting the soles of their feet when stepping on the blocks. And now, he’s gone another step (sorry) further by moving beyond the world of footwear and into the realm of Lego-specific home cleaning devices, creating a vacuum that sucks up the little plastic bricks from the floor and sorts them by shape.

Benedetto says he was inspired to pursue this idea by watching an episode of The Office where David Wallace tells Michael about his exciting new idea: A Shop-Vac-style clean-up device that “teaches kids how to pick up their own toys” called, unfortunately, the Suck It.

Taking Wallace’s queue, Benedetto modifies a Shop-Vac by designing and 3D printing four canister inserts that filter Lego pieces by size as they’re sucked up. He uses a transparent canister and improves the airflow so Lego blocks easily get grabbed up by the vacuum and move through the sorting layers with enough suction to get properly sorted.

The Lego vacuum (or, we suppose, the Lego Suck It) performs admirably when demonstrated at the end of the video. A montage shows Benedetto running the tube around a carpet, easily sucking up Lego bricks so they’re sorted into the appropriate layers of the canister. Not only does it work as intended, but the cleaning process is unexpectedly hypnotic to watch.

The next step, if we follow The Office’s Suck It precedent, is Benedetto selling his invention to the U.S. military for millions of dollars so it can be used to vacuum up and sort radioactive waste into neatly ordered, size appropriate chunks of deadly material.

[via Nerdist]

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