Ack, the dreaded interAdmin Threadjack!11!
Anyways, I did some preliminary testing in a manual press just to make sure I understood the failure modes.
I crushed one brick by itself...and holy crap, did that take a lot of force. I was using a manual arbor press with probably a 20:1 force multiplication, and I still almost had my feet off the floor pulling on the handle:
(sorry for the noisy pictures, I wasn't using a flash and am too lazy to retake them)
This isn't a good test of how a column of LEGO bricks would fail, however--for that, we need to test a small stack, starting with 2:
I quickly learned two things: these are very sensitive to asymmetrical loading, as you'd expect in something that is failing in what amounts to a fancy buckling mode, and that the studs crush in way before the rest of the brick is near failure.
To mitigate the stud crushing, I tried a double stack with flat caps:
This was TREMENDOUSLY strong. I was actually very impressed. It may just have been that this one was centered under the press better than the others or something, but it had a much stronger failure mode than any of the other stacks I tested. However, there was still too much going on with the top block, so I added a 3rd to help isolate the failure to the middle and bottom blocks, simulating the large weight above:
This is another one that was a bit off center, and so had a rather boring failure mode. However, the top brick survived nearly unscathed, so I think that justifies my '3 bricks with flat tile tops' technique. To check and see if the studs were intact, I popped the tiles off the top brick:
You can't really see it, but they're completely pristine. Looks like we having a winning combination.
Stay tuned for our first calibrated runs, hopefully later today!