Awesome Marbles

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.

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.

We’ve seen how cheap mass-produced marbles are made. Now let’s take a look at a small West Virginia factory that combines machinery with glass art to create its unique marbles. Stephen Bahr captured this delightful behind-the-scenes look at Dave’s Appalachian Swirls as it creates a batch of its prized custom marbles.

LittleBall Creations makes beautiful marble mazes from bent and soldered copper wire. Here, they show off one of their self-contained mazes that sits inside of a cube. The marble rolls from one end of the track to the other when the cube is flipped over. If you’re interested in buying their work, contact them on Facebook.

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.

David Scott of Enbiggen is known for making virtual marble machines inspired by pop culture. This musical machine celebrates the world of Aladdin with an enchanting rendition of A Whole New World performed on xylophone bars.

This desktop plaything is a tiny marble track under a dome. It’s a great distraction from work and stress as its marbles climb to the top and roll down its track with the push of a lever. Its mechanism uses no electricity, and it’s built with quality parts including glass, metal, and cork. Measures 10.5″ H x 6.3″ Diameter.

Scott’s Marble Runs shows off a truly impressive build that start outside of his house, then winds its way inside through countless bends and turns. It takes a full six minutes for a marble to complete the entire course, which he built using Quercetti Skyrail marble tracks.

Mathematician Yosuke Ikeda created this tricky machine which uses a mirror to make it appear that there is one more marble on its turntable than there really is. Except when the mirror is moved out of the way, another marble really is there.

We always enjoy watching the spheres go round and round on marble runs. They’re usually made wood, metal, or plastic, but DanCreator made his marble run out of his favorite material, cardboard. We’re impressed with its complexity and the precision of its ramps and curves. It took him roughly two months to build, and the effort shows.

We love Acoustic Trench’s soothing kalimba cover of Can’t Help Falling in Love. With the help of Cinema 4D and OctaneRender, motion designers TheCritters created a photorealistic CG marble maze that syncs up perfectly with the tune. We can only imagine how much work it took to get everything to line up perfectly.

Artist Daniel de Bruin is an expert at making metal tracks for marble machines. He’s taught us how to make our own, and even made a room-sized marble track. Now, he’s downsized his efforts, creating the tiniest marble course we’ve ever seen, using a custom drive mechanism, 0.6mm wire, and a 5mm wide ball bearing.

Gravitrax marble tracks look like fun, but you’d need to invest a lot of money to build something as impressive as the course that Jelle’s Marble Runs put together. They divided the track into four distinct areas, from soothing single-marble action to a cacophonous 1000-marble avalanche. It must have taken days to set this all up.

Most of the marble machines we’ve seen are either powered by gravity or motors. But builder Daniel de Bruin shows us how he made a mechanism that stores up energy using a spring, carrying marbles to the top of a tiny bent-wire maze using a Ferris wheel of sorts.