Playing with SNOT

Continuing the exploration into interesting LEGO techniques, my son played around with SNOT. SNOT stands for Studs Not On Top – it is a way of building LEGO where the studs face in other directions, usually sideways.

One great example of this technique is the “SNOT ball” – this is a ball of LEGO where the studs face outward on all sides. It involves building 6 matching sides out of plates and then joining them together internally using various SNOT pieces. We followed an online guide for the first side, but my son picked it up really quickly and did the rest on his own:

To prove that is was indeed a ball, it had to be rolled (and captured in slow motion):

A pretty cool experiment that turned out to work really well! We need more SNOT pieces to build this kind of thing more frequently and on a larger scale (we didn’t actually have enough to maintain the structural integrity for long, and it fell apart on the next roll), so we’re definitely needing to expand our collection to include more versatile bricks.