Dominos is a table game, but if you give dominos to a kid they will stand them on end in a line then tip the first one over to watch the rest of them fall.
Domino toppling has been fascinating people for years. The world record for the most dominos toppled in a single chain reaction by an individual is 321,197, set by Liu Yang from China on 31 December 2011, in Beijing. For a team of people, the world record is 4,491,863 set by Weijers Domino Productions during “Domino Day” on 13 November 2009, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. A simple search on youtube will find hundreds of videos from how-to’s for fancy domino tricks, to many large domino falls.
The weapon of choice for the serious domino stacker is a piece of high density injection molded plastic 48mm long, 24mm wide, 7.5mm thick and weighing 8.5 grams. These can be bought from several online stores in several dozen colors. Most big time stackers make their own “extras” like bridges, waterfalls, 180° spins, and an endless array of specialty effects.
A favorite effect in almost all major domino stacks is the large field of dominos that when toppled displays a picture, sign or graphic design. You can already see where this is going, can’t you.
T3 DOMINOS….
Having pixelated the T3 logo so many times, I was reasonably sure that it would take a display around 6ft wide to really do the graphic justice. Besides, I calculated that would be over 4000 dominos, which is not much compared to over 300K, but still an impressive thing to set up and then knock down.
Some research revealed that the optimum spacing for each “row” was 10mm face to face, with the rows about 3mm apart. From there it was not hard to create the template:
Shopping around it appears that the dominos to execute this design will cost around $450. So it is unlikely that I will be doing this anytime soon. In the absence of the real thing, I simulated the fall: