Ben Tardif spent three years designing and building an intricate marble machine he calls Marble Mountain. It has everything- ramps, stairs, slides, a castle, a luge run, a ski jump, a golf course, a bowling alley, and so much more. He says it’s not yet complete, but it’s complete enough that he can turn it on and show us what it does.
-It has a footprint of 12' x 8' and stands 8' tallGive him a couple more years and this will be a monster. See more of Tardif’s project at Instagram. (via Tastefully Offensive)
-The material of the tracks and supports consist almost entirely of wood
-Everything is custom-made from materials bought mostly from craft and hardware stores (mainly Michaels and Home Depot)
-The lift is 11 feet long, holds 90 marbles at once, and rotates at 1 revolution per second (60 RPM)
-It takes at least 250 marbles to keep it running without delay, but looks better with 300
-There are 32 possible paths for the marbles
-There are 14 rockers that distribute the marbles onto the different paths
-The first year and a half of construction happened in my apartment before moving to a small warehouse
-The original design was smaller and not as cool, so a redesign took place making it much bigger and morphed into a half-conical shape with the lift right down the middle
-I do know how much it cost to make thus far but even my finaceé doesn't know that number
-It takes just under an hour to set up or tear down Marble Mountain
-Since it is modular, I could remove a section and rebuild it as something else as long as the tracks matched up with the other pieces
1 comment:
Very impressive. He was smart to make it modular, movable and mostly gravity powered. Most of these machines I've seen (on video) you can follow the balls from start to finish but this one has so many paths I could watch it a long time with different things going all the time.
All those balls are the same size, material, and presumably the same weight. I wonder how it would work with real marbles?
At about 3:50 there's a starting block with 7 gates where the next 7 balls fill the gates and the 8th ball trips a lever to release the 7. I got a chuckle watching the seven rolling into the block and filling the gates in order as they came to an empty one. A couple of the balls acted like livestock at a feed trough, once or twice "thinking" they could squeeze in between two full spots before moving on.
Nevermind, I'm a sicko. LoL
xoxoxoBruce
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