Inside the $1.2 million LEGO Masters Brick Pit: Surprising facts and secrets you never knew
Rosie Scott
Updated . First published
Could you turn your LEGO build into $100,000? LEGO Masters Australia has made a Bricktacular return and that’s exactly what this year’s teams are competing for.
There are 4 million bricks in the legendary LEGO Masters Brick Pit, with 20,000 additional specialty bricks brought in for the finale builds. That’s not the only secret this magical vault holds... Brought to you by Kmart.
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Is LEGO the world's largest tyre manufacturer? It sure is, producing 300 million tyres annually. You might expect the holder of that title to be Bridgestone of Micheline but when you take into account that LEGO manufactures millions of tiny tyres for their construction sets it starts to make sense.
Attribution: Drive
LEGO is also taking strides to produce those tyres out of recycled materials ike old fishing nets, ropes and engine oil. Vroom, vroom!
Attribution: Nine
What happens to the builds after each episode? Fans have been wondering the same thing for the last eight years! Hours of work go into building the models, but sadly, they don't go off to a LEGO Masters museum. What really happens is each team has a sorter to break down their model after the episode. What a cool gig!
Attribution: Nine
We’ve all heard of the word LEGO but do any of us know what it actually means?
In 1932 (94 years ago!) master carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen started making wooden toys under the company LEGO®, combining two Danish words ‘Leg Godt’, meaning ‘Play Well’. By 1949 the first bricks, called automatic binding bricks, were launched. With no tubes inside them, the bricks didn’t exactly stick well...
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But they were still a hit!
In 1953, the bricks were launched in five colours: white, red, yellow, blue and green. From that same year, the name LEGO® was moulded onto every brick.
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Did you know, LEGO Minifigures are the largest 'population' in the world? Over four billion of them have been produced (and counting!), which is a whole lot considering the first LEGO Minifigure was launched in 1978 (47 years ago).
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With that much LEGO inside, it's no surprise the Brick Pit is worth a fair bit of cash. You're looking at a whopping $1.2 million worth of LEGO in one room (consumer value). More than 9,000 of those pieces were used to build the most expensive LEGO set ever released in the entire world...
Attribution: Nine
Shhh... LEGO holds a 70-year-old secret - their bricks haven't changed in years! A LEGO brick from 1956 fits on a LEGO brick made today. That's all thanks to the moulds used to produce LEGO elements, which are accurate to within 0.004mm – less than the width of a hair.
Attribution: Nine
A neat four million bricks may be in the Brick Pit, but that's nothing compared to the mammoth 36 billion bricks produced each year – that's 68,000 every minute. That's a lot of LEGO bricks in existence, in fact, there are 80 bricks for every person on the planet.
Attribution: Nine
