Marble Machine

I purchased plans for a marble machine from this we site. http://woodgears.ca/ It will be ready for a Christmas gift for my grandkids. I made the gears and the bowl on my Shopbot, everything else was bandsaw, sander, tablesaw etc. A lot of fun to build. Here is a video of the machine in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z2A6qJyURY Video is by the author.

Phil

Phil,
I've seen his machine he built, it's a little different then yours but the principle is the same i'm sure. Yours looks really cool. How long did it take for you to build yours?
Based on the plans you got, did you find alot of parts you could adapt to cut/make on the bot? Was it an easy build or a real PITA? Do you have any other pictures of the insides or during the build process? Excellent job!:D

The parts that I found practical to make on the bot were the gears and the bowl. I can't tell you how long it took to make because this was something I worked at when I found time over a period of months. I found the plans a bit awkward because they parts drawings don't follow traditional orthographic projection format. They are essentially patterns.
Two things that were invaluable were the sketchup drawings and the videos.
The sketchup drawing allowed me to see the project in 3D, rotate, zoom etc. Also I could remove parts to get a clear view of what was behind them. The videos are well done but I found that I needed to have my computer in the shop and refer to them more often that I'd like. However, I'm not sure how I would have made some of the parts without the video.
Also all of the dimensions are metric which I am not used to, that slowed me down.

Phil

This is one of the toys that has been on my bucket list for some time. I am jealous! :D Well done. Russ

This page will tell you just about everything you need to know. http://woodgears.ca/mm2/index.html Plans are onlu $16

Phil

Russ...i can certainly see how you could adapt something like this into a train setup to time it to drop marbles into passing "coal cars":D