One doesn’t need an engineering degree to make one great engineering project. He or she only needs to have skills with tools. Just like Ben Tardif, a woodworker who is also a stuntman, who created this marvelous marble machine.
Tardif posted his work on Reddit and YouTube to share the masterpiece he calls Marble Mountain, which is exactly what it is like: an 8-foot tall, 12-foot wide, and 8-foot long structure where marbles get around different obstacle courses.
Source: Ben Tardif
It has 25 different sections which can run a total of 300 marbles at a time. Tardif, who goes by the handle The_Gus_Destrover over Reddit, even invented a unit of measurement called MPM or marbles per minute to describe the speed of his marble machine which is at 60 MPM.
And Marble Mountain is not like any machine with the boring pieces. Certain parts mimic places like San Francisco’s iconic Lombard Street and Golden Gate Bridge or Times Square. The rest are common from a marble machines which is a racetrack, bowling alley, miniature golf course, and a ski jump.
The marble machine starts with the spiral mechanism which feeds the marbles from the bottom to the top. This is considered the core of the machine.
Source: Ben Tardif
While the race track segment is rather usual in machines like this, Tardif made a twist in his: he devised a mechanism that only allows seven marbles fill in the racing slots, with the eighth marble automatically opening the gates for them.
Source: Ben Tardif
Being the genius that his masterpiece is, Tardif’s post got a lot of praise around Reddit with now around 12,6000 upvotes on r/videos a year later.
In a comment, he revealed that it took him about a week to record every moving piece of the marbles for the 7-minute long video.
Made in the last few days of March of 2016, this is the second time that a Redditor had created a genius marble machine. Earlier that month, Swedish musician Martin Molin created one that actually played music using over 3,000 parts and 2,000 marbles.
Source: Business Insider
