Olar's Lego Tools & Tips

Lego Tips:
Getting The Most Out of Your Pick-a-Brick Cup

The Wall

As you walk past a Lego store, one of the most eye-catching features are the rows of colorful circles along the back wall.  These are not a decoration, this is the Lego Pick-a-Brick (PAB) wall.  Each circular cavity contains hundreds or even thousands of copies of a single Lego building element.  These can be anything from blue 2x4 bricks or pink 1x1 round plates to space ship cockpits, barrels, and even horses! 

Depending on the size of the store there can be more than 200 PAB bins. When visiting the Lego store at Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney location, their PAB wall was 36 bins wide and 8 bins high!  In all fairness, there weren't 288 different Lego elements. Many of the bins were duplicates, and they normally only used the bottom 6 or 7 rows, using colorfully backlit photos to fill the rest. But all the same, it is a magical sight to behold.

The Cups

So the next question is "How Can I Take These Home?" This is where the PAB Cups come in.  There are two sizes of cups: Small and Large, costing $9 and $16 respectively.  All you do is pull the size cup out of the rack, jam in as much as you can and slap a cover on it.  The cover does not need to snap in place, just touch the top of the cup.  The store workers will gladly tape the cover on so it doesn't explode and fill the back seat of your car with Lego Goodness.

But are you getting the most for your money?  Have you filled every vacant space within the cup? Could you fit just a couple more 1x4 tiles along the side? 

The first time I filled a PAB cup was at the down town Chicago store.  Being a guy with good space evaluation skills I felt I was ready for the challenge!  I started clipping bricks and plates together and testing them inside the cup.  I kept at it until I had a fully packed PAB cup, leaving no additional space.  I was heading for the checkout when my wife called and asked where I was as more than two hours had passed... oops...  So, while I am confident that I Got My Money's Worth on that PAB cup, I'm not so sure about the relational costs though. (As an added note, it took me about 2hrs to get it apart too.)

If you search the internet, you can find tons of examples of how to get the most when filling the PAB cup, but when it comes to purchasing BRICKS, this is the best solution I have seen.

169 Bricks in a Large Cup

I don't know who first came up with this design, but it is as close to perfection as I've seen.  Getting 169 2x4 bricks into one large PAB cup is REALLY Cool and at ~10.5 cents per brick the cost is very reasonable. Another great thing about this procedure is that it only takes about 10-15 minutes to do it.

The diagram at right shows how to construct each level. The one trick it to rotate Level 1 90 degrees from the rest of the levels.
Once levels 1-6 are placed into the cup, you will need to apply some pressure to deform the cup sufficiently for the cap to touch the top edge of the cup.

84 Bricks in a Small Cup

If you don't need that many bricks, or you don't have the extra $7, or you just want a Small PAB cup, then you can use Levels 4-6 to get 84 bricks.  But, where I said you needed to apply some pressure to get the 169 bricks into the large cup, you need to apply a lot of pressure to get the 84 bricks into the small cup.  This may be enough pressure to actually crack the small cup.

Final Note

This design uses 2x4 bricks being aligned the same way.  This does make the levels rather unstable.  Rotating the bricks 90 degrees will still take up the same space, but will provide more stability. 

And you don't have to use just 2x4 brick.  The important thing is to keep the overall shape, with each level being 4 studs thick and the same number of studs per row.  So, instead of 169 2x4 bricks, you could get 338 1x4 bricks, Or 507 2x4 plates, OR 1,352 1x1 bricks! Although, 1x1 bricks really wouldn't hold together, but you get the idea.