The Woodshop Shed

Halo - a Mechanical Marble Machine

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


This is Halo, a fully mechanical, spring-powered, dual track, eddy current limited, wooden marble machine. To get it started, just wind it up. A hidden lever pops out from the large drum at the bottom of the sculpture to give you plenty of winding leverage. A ratchet and one-way pawl keeps the sculpture from back-driving while you wind it. To keep the spring from unwinding too quickly, an array of magnets spins in close proximity to an aluminum disc. This induces eddy currents, loops of electric current that generate their own magnetic fields, fields which oppose the fields of the magnets moving through them. Essentially, this acts as a silent, self-regulating magnetic brake. The faster the spring tries to make the magnets spin, the more resistive force they encounter. Essentially, this mechanism keeps the lift ring moving slowly and at a near-constant speed. Marbles are picked up from the base of the sculpture and travel up with the ring to the top, where they are dropped onto a switch that determines which track each marble will venture down. The marbles move in and out, and up and down as they make their journey down the tracks.To see Halo in action, you can see a video on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvQgzEcX8I8If you'd like to build your own, plans are available on my website: www.derekhugger.com/halo.htmlI'd love to know what you think of it.-Derek

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