V48 LEGO Engine Runs Like a Champ!

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a huge fan of LEGOs, having amassed a massive collection of random block over the years by buying various kits and adding them to my ever-growing pile. I haven’t bought any new ones in a couple of decades, but somewhere in a box in my garage lies a huge collection of bricks, many of which came from Technic kits, which include gears and very realistic engine parts. If you collect them long enough, or just order the pieces you want direct from LEGO’s website if you want to bypass the searching for Technic kits, which aren’t always readily available at retailers.

Over the past year or so, there’s been a trend on YouTube of various LEGO aficionados building engines out of the engine block, crank and piston pieces. Most of these videos show a model V8 attached to a high-speed electric motor to see how fast the engines can spin before they fly apart, usually just scattering piece and not actually breaking, though I’m sure there’s been some breakage here and there.

This guy decided to take a different approach and build a massive V48 engine – yeah, that’s 48 pistons worth of plastic engine spinning to life – and use it to test his various electric motors to see which one would spin the model engine the fastest and with the most torque. From what I can tell, he has nothing but his finger to tell how much torque the engine is producing, so we have to take his word for the strength of each engine, but you can clearly see how fast each one spins.

Even though the LEGO engines themselves aren’t actually running, it looks amazingly cool too see that many tiny pistons working together like the real thing. Go ahead and give the video a look and see what you think about his huge model engine.