Awesome Marble Machines

Japan’s KARAKURI Channel loves to make inventive mechanical playthings. This time, they built an amazing smartphone case with a marble machine inside. The see-through maze keeps tiny ball bearings rolling using a complex series of gears and a small screw-drive motor powered via the phone’s USB-C port. English subtitles are available.

Maker Sean Hodgins created a tiny marble machine that can be hung on a Christmas tree as an ornament. He designed a conical track that can be 3D printed in a single piece, then added a gear-drive elevator to carry ball bearings to its top. The whole thing is set inside of a plastic sphere for hanging. Sean gifted his design on Instructables and Maker World.

There are few things more soothing than marbles and ball bearings rolling around. Maker Engineezy shared this video showing off nine supremely satisfying ball machines. Along the way, he explains how he built each one and how they work. The machines incorporate 3D-printed components, motors, magnets, and Arduino controllers to entertain.

Any time an object moves, it transfers energy. With that in mind, Engineezy wanted to see if he could capture enough energy from rolling steel spheres to charge a phone. The finished machine is an impressive feat of engineering. Sadly, it uses much more electricity than it outputs to lift marbles to the top… because you can’t get something for nothing.

These marble runs from Robotime stand out from their other mechanical kits thanks to their colorful cyberpunk aesthetics. Both The Last City and Future City have a motorized lift, LED lighting, and loads of ramps, pipelines, and twisty switchbacks. Connect multiple units horizontally or vertically to create larger mazes. Each module measures 9″ x 7″ x 3″.

Masked Marble used thousands of GraviTrax parts to create this incredible 6.5-foot-tall, 9-foot-long model of Notre Dame that incorporates multiple marble runs. Before getting to the big build, he assembled a few off-the-shelf models of the iconic Parisian cathedral and built marble tracks through them.

A gravity well is a cone-shaped device that pulls marbles or other small balls into its center like a vortex. JBV Creative built a version of a gravity well connected to an elevator, so as spheres drop through its middle, they head back up to the top and start their journey all over again. It’s incredibly satisfying once he drops thousands of steel balls into it.

Inspired by Colin Furze and his tea-making Rube Goldberg machine, engineer James Bruton wanted to make his own overly complicated contraption for fixing drinks. Bruton’s TEA-800 beverage dispenser is triggered by a large ball bearing that activates various parts of the machine. It gradually moves a mug into position and fills it with hot water, brews a tea bag, and adds milk.

A little while back, maker Ivan Miranda engineered a very cool clock that tells time using marbles. But his kinetic sculpture is too slow to tell the time accurately. He’s since made numerous refinements to the design of his clock, and it’s now faster and smoother, so it can properly update its digits once per minute. It’s totally awesome but ridiculously loud.

Maker Ivan Miranda wanted to build a mechanical clock that uses marbles to show the time. He created an elevator that lifts marbles and drops them into a track. He used light sensors to detect white marbles and solenoids to release the right ones to display dot-matrix digits. It’s a work in progress, but it’s already impressive. Watch part one of the build here.

Marble machines can be so much fun to watch in action. The 3D Printer Academy shows how they built a neat marble machine from modular components that hold together with 3D-printed thumbscrews. It took a little trial and error to get it all working smoothly and without jamming, but eventually, it worked perfectly.

Kinetic sculpture maker JBV Creative shows off one of his coolest builds yet, a machine that creates a sine wave motion as ball bearings roll along its horseshoe-shaped ribs. He sells an STL template for 3D printing your own, along with a detailed assembly video. He’s also made a version that’s twice as long.

Wood Marble Machine builds exactly what their YouTube channel name says. This modular machine carries steel ball bearings up a double escalator and then rolls them back down through a series of ramps, bowls, and a spinning pachinko board before doing it all over again. The sounds it makes are wonderfully soothing.

ROKR’s intricate marble run makes a great desktop plaything. The crank-driven elevator wheel keeps marbles flowing through the endless maze, which includes multiple ramps, a spiral funnel, and other fun obstacles along the way. You’ll have fun building the 294-piece laser-cut kit too.

After his tribute to Aladdin, CG artist David Scott of Enbiggen is back with another musical marble machine. Hit play and enjoy as Indiana Jones relives the mine cart chase from The Temple of Doom and the boulder scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The soothing kalimba music was performed by BluntoMarx.

Robotime’s latest ROKR wood model lets you build a tabletop marble run that looks like a tiny chocolate factory. Turn the crank, and colorful marbles roll through twists and turns of the maze. The 420-piece model takes about 7 hours to assemble and offers ample challenge for kit builders. We only wish it made real candy.