Marble Machines Part 1 - First Attempt

Sunday, July 5th, 2020

Hello again everyone! today I'm going to cover the build process for my first attempt at a rolling ball sculpture. Then, I'm going to critique my own build, figure out what worked and what didn't work, and plan a little for my next sculpture and what I hope to improve upon.

Inspiration for the Build

When I was younger, yet another one of my fascinations was with these wire rolling ball sculptures. They had one at my local planetarium and children's museum, and I would spend hours just watching the balls make their ways down the various paths built into the sculpture.

Now, this was a time when YouTube was just starting to take off. There were many videos on the internet of different ball sculptures that I would spend lots of time watching, and I always dreamed of having one of my own someday. Though, at the time, I was unfamiliar with where you could go to buy a rolling ball sculpture and didn't yet understand the concept of having to commission someone to build one for you.

So I shelved the idea. It's always been in the back of my head, but I haven't ever made an actual attempt to try to get one.

Fast forward to the year 2020. There's this global pandemic going on, and I finally realized that keeping myself informed wasn't doing wonders for my mental health. So I started to take on more and more projects, hoping that by working on lots of things at once I could distract myself from the fact that society is on fire. It was then I finally came across a fantastic YouTube video with complete instructions on how to build a marble machine with steel wire.

That video is here for those curious. It's a fantastic guide, one that I didn't follow step by step but used for general guidance.

I knew how to solder, and I knew how to bend wire. Maybe the marble machine of my dreams wasn't too far out of reach...

Getting Started and Constructing the Sculpture

After saving up money DoorDashing, I purchased some steel wire. I opted to go for both 16 and 14 gauge wire, intending to use one for the main structure of the machine and the other for the track itself. So I soldered together a mesh grid for the base and added a few support struts before trying to put some track together.

After two or three days of work, I had a very, very simple track. Nothing fancy, but to me it was a good start.

Initial track on the machine

I moved my workspace into the garage, and the next time I sat down to work, I began on trying to build a track switching mechanism. This took me all of two or three hours to solder, because I was more familiar with soldering electronics and not structural wire. The result wasn't the best switcher to ever exist, but I knew it would work well enough.

Marble Divider in Action

I spent the next week or two constructing the rest of the track while I brainstormed how to build a lifting mechanism. As the machine came together, it became less flimsy and more fleshed out, and I was actually pretty happy with how the build was turning out. However, I was running into an issue with the lifting mechanism, and ultimately the problems started stacking up as they usually do. Eventually, I had a sculpture that was 80% done, though there was a conversation between me and my mom that made me realize something.

She asked when it would be done, saying she wanted to display a marble machine around our house somewhere that could run off a motor automatically. Given my previous adventures with gearboxes and lifting mechanisms, I realized that adding a motorized lifter to this sculpture was going to be difficult.

That wasn't my biggest concern though. This thing wasn't enjoyable to look at in the slightest. What I envisioned was a beautiful sculpture with balls and a lifter that would be the centerpiece of a room or make a good talking point in conversation. What I had produced looked like a half-hearted final project for a high school shop class. I wasn't going to proudly display this on my desk in my dorm room, I was probably going to shelf this in my closet with my other experimental projects.

And so I realized this was probably the end for this particular sculpture. But even if I'm not going to display it proudly in a public space, I did learn an awful lot about how to build one, and I feel that with a little bit better planning, I'll be able to create a sculpture 10x better and more fun to look at.

Almost Finished Build on Workbench

Lessons Learned

There's a few things I learned during the build process that I would've loved to know beforehand. I'll be documenting those here just in case you'd like to build your own and don't want to have to learn these things on your own.

1.  Soldering vs. Welding

"Professional" marble sculptures are built using TIG welding, which is probably the most precise of welding processes. This ensures strong connections between wires, and I'm fairly sure steel wire plays better with welded joints rather than soldered connections.

The reason I'm not using TIG welding is because I don't currently have access to the equipment needed. However, I learned that soldering steel wire can cause the wire to heat up and screw up nearby solder joints, which isn't something that occurs with welding. If I build larger sculptures or end up using larger marbles in the future, I'll likely start to use a welder to put the sculpture together. However, for now, soldering should be just fine for what I'm building.

2. Planning is Essential

The biggest lesson I probably learned was about planning. The only planning I did was building a steel mesh to base the sculpture off of, and that was it. This left me a lot of room for experimentation, which is good, but I didn't know what I wanted the end result to look like. It's like knowing your destination is North but not having a map to follow, and in this case, I wasn't really satisfied with the look of the end result.

I've already started planning how I'm going to build my next sculpture, and let me tell you, I think it's going to turn out great. I've given myself dimensional limits, and I've put in space for the lifting mechanism before instead of after, so I know I will be able to fit it.

3. Helping Hands are Excellent

If you intend to do any sort of work on a smaller scale, I recommend you get a set of helping hands. Not a friend or family member, but a small jig that will help hold parts. These can be awesome when it's hard to reach a particular spot, hard to hold still, or if the part you need to hold will burn you if you touch it. I will probably even be getting a second set since they were so helpful on this project.

A Sneak Peak into Future Sculptures

Now that I've learned from my first time building a marble sculpture, I've set a few goals for my next marble machine:

- Machine must be nice to look at
- Machine must be motorized, and powered by wall power
- Machine must have an on/off switch
- Machine must be constrained within a predefined space
- Machine must use a combination of wireworking and 3D printing

The last goal is a stylistic choice. As I've researched different marble machine makers, I'm starting to realize that just like many different kinds of art, each maker has their own unique style. And I've decided that I want to pioneer the combination of 3D printing and wireworking into one marble sculpture. I think this will bring a lot of life and color into the sculpture itself, which should make it look all that much better.

So the next step is to get some new 3D printing filament, and to wait for my low-rpm motor and power supply to show up. Until then, I suppose I can work on some of the 3D models, but you never really know how things are going to turn out until you're holding a physical prototype in your hands. Having this project under my belt, I have high hopes for the next sculpture!

Thank you again for reading, and as always, keep making things!
- Will