In this video, we're going to be showing you how to take this Lego brick container,
and transform it into a vacuum that can suck up,
and then store all of your Lego brick pieces.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] [Music]
[Music]
To get started, we're going to need some kind of plastic box,
a vacuum cleaner and some spare vacuum hose.
I happen to have one of these actual Lego boxes
that's shaped like a giant Lego brick,
but you don't have to use one of these.
If you just have a clear plastic shoe box size container,
that will work just fine.
We're also going to need an exacto knife,
a glue gun,
some type of mesh cloth or fabric,
and all of the ingredients that we use to make our proto-putty,
that's type 1 silicone,
some food coloring and some corn starch.
Here's what we've got in mind.
We'll cut two holes into the lid,
one for the hose going in,
and one for the hose going out.
A proto-putty seal around the whole lid will prevent any air from leaking,
and a mesh filter on one side will prevent any Lego pieces
from accidentally getting sucked up into the vacuum cleaner.
First, we need to take the lid of our container and add some holes.
If you're using these nice Lego containers,
I like to put them right here on these bumps
because it just keeps the aesthetic.
If you're using you container with a more flat lid,
you can just cut right into the flat surface.
We're going to want one hole on one side where our vacuum cleaner hose will go in,
and another hole on the other side where our additional hose will come out.
Now, I'm in a workshop and here we have a shop vacuum.
But if you want to just do this at home with your home vacuum,
that will work just fine as long as you have a hose that can be pulled out.
One quick note about using a home vacuum,
if you have the type of vacuum that has turning bristles and you take the hose out,
you do want to make sure that those bristles
aren't still rotating in contact with the carpet
because after a couple of minutes,
the friction can begin to melt or burn some types of carpet.
So, if you are doing his as a home vacuum,
you may want take your vacuum cleaner
and tip it on its back so that the bristles aren't going to burn anything.
Now, we want to make a hole in one side that's just the same size as this adapter,
and a hole on the other side that's the size of our vacuum hose.
I picked this vacuum hose up at a store
that just specializes in all sorts of different types of hose.
It was pretty convenient.
If you don't have one of those near you, there are a few other options.
There are some kinds of pool and drainage hose that are about the same size,
and this is a 1 and 1/4 inch diameter.
Or you might be able to find an old vacuum that doesn't work anymore,
and take the hose off of there,
or if you have a vacuum repair shop,
they might have some broken vacuums and be able to sell you one of the hoses.
Let's take our hose,
place it right where we want our hole to be,
and then trace around it with a permanent marker.
[Music]
And let's do the same thing with our other hose.
These hoses are very similar in size but not quite identical.
If you happen to have a hole saw
that is exactly the same size as one of your hose connections,
You can probably use that and it should work just fine.
Both of my hose connections ended up being not quite the same size
as any of the hole saws,
so we're just going to use an exacto knife suspect.
[Music]
I suspect I'm still going to need a little additional trimming
before this fits quite right.
Yeah, it's still just a little tight.
I just need to trim down the plastic a bit more.
[Music]
There we go.
Our hose now fits in and it is nice and snug.
It holds itself in place.
You can see that the lid is just really well attached.
But we can pop it out when we need to.
That's one cut. Now, let's cut the other side.
[Music]
Now, on this box specifically, the corners have these support pieces
that I think helped keep the box in shape and help it stay on the lid.
While those may increase the structural integrity and be a good thing most of time,
they can kind of get in the way for us,
so what we need to do is trim away some of these little plastic tabs.
[Music]
We now have our hose intake,
and our hose outtake?
Is that right?
Hose in and hose out.
So, what we need to do is make it so this lid fits perfectly snugly onto our box.
As it is, we can attach the lid and it may stay on,
but there's a lot of space around the sides.
Air is going to be able to get in through all of the gaps,
and we don't want that.
We want all of the suction to come out of the front of the hose.
So what we need to do is make a proto-putty seal
that goes all the way around,
so when we have the vacuum turned on,
all of a suction is coming from one spot only.
[Music]
Also, this particular container has two small holes at the bottom,
and we want to plug those up,
and we'll just use a little bit of our proto-putty for that as well.
[Music]
All right, our proto-putty is starting to set but it's not there yet.
You can see we've still got lots of squishiness to it,
and that's exactly what we want.
While it's still squishy,
we need to take our lid and press it down over the box
so it forms a nice tight seal.
And the goal is not to make it so the lid can't come on and off
because of course we do still want to be able to remove it.
But the goal is so that when there is suction in the box,
it just pulls itself nice and closed
instead of having lots of air rush in all of the gaps.
[Music]
One more thing that you can do.
If you cut your holes and you find that the hose is a little more loose than you'd like,
you can use some extra proto-putty to make a seal that goes around the hole
to make sure your hose connection is nice and snug.
Depending on how well you cut your holes,
you may need to do this on one side, both sides or neither side.
Now that we've got everything formed,
it's time to just let our proto-putty cure for a few minutes until it's nice and rigid.
Our protoputty is nice and cured.
So now we can remove our hose,
and we can remove the whole lid.
[Music]
If you've made the proto-putty correctly with all the cornstarch mixed in,
it shouldn't stick too much.
It should just be able to slide on and off while holding itself nicely in place.
One of the nicest things about the proto-putty that we use for the seal
is that it's designed not to stick to things too much
by adding all of that corn starch.
That's really nice because it means we're able to fit it on the lid,
and then take the lid off and on.
But one of the downsides is that it is possible that your seal
will just be kind of loose on your box.
If you want to make it a little bit more permanent,
you can take a bead of the caulking without any food coloring or cornstarch in it,
and that should do a pretty good job of bonding the silicone seal
to the plastic of the box.
This stuff is sticky.
It's only not sticky because we added so much cornstarch.
Now we don't want any little Lego pieces to get sucked up
into the actual vacuum cleaner.
So what we want to do is add a filter onto one side.
I've got a little piece of screen mesh.
You could also use any sort of cloth with large mesh,
like a tool or some kind of netting.
This is just what I have available so this is what I'm going to use.
This little flange seems like it will get in the way,
so let's just try and trim that off with our exacto knife.
Now, I've got a hot glue gun and our mesh,
let's just cut this to size and then glue it right over that hole.
It should still let air flow through it really nicely.
It's not going to slow down the vacuum power at all,
but it's just going to make sure that none of our Lego pieces
end up in our vacuum cleaner.
[Music]
That's pretty hard to see but it did draw on it.
[Music]
That'll do it.
We have a mesh covered hole in one side,
and a non-mesh covered hole on the other side.
We should be able to pop this lid on,
attach our vacuum hoses,
and start sucking up Lego directly into our Lego storage box .
[Music]
Box full of Lego pieces.
Very cool. That worked great.
And you can see a little bit of fuzz did get sucked up
and pulled up against our little filter here.
So that may be something that is worth cleaning every once in a while.
Really small dust should probably still get pulled right through that filter.
The bigger dust will just get caught up against it but that worked great.
It even pulled up some of these longer skinny pieces.
They didn't like to go very well, but when you suck them up with other pieces.
It all sort of traveled through the hose,
even some pieces that I thought seems kind of large,
like this little window frame piece,
It does fit in the tube but not super easily.
But it still managed to travel up through there...
Quite nicely.
Well, this works great,
and I did want to do one thing just to show it off even a little bit more.
I have a second Lego box that I've modified
by adding a clear window onto the front of it.
Now, we should be able to see the Lego pieces
after they've traveled through the vacuum tube,
land in our box.
And we can see how well that works.
[Music]
That's awesome.
Just flies in there all over the place.
It's pretty neat.
Now, like I said it's not necessary to put the clear window on the side of your box.
That's just something that lets us see what's going on as Lego flies in there.
And I think it looks pretty cool.
Overall though, I would just go with the normal box.
No window added.
Because you know, that's going to work just as well,
and save you some time and effort.
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