Topographic Marble Run
It’s the very first marble toy of 2021! The Topographic Marble Run.
I was looking back at some old doodles and sketches and stumbled across this little concept:
The idea here being that a relatively flat surface of square modules, when lowered into a box, would raise up into a rollable marble track. I’ve seen some fairly high tech pneumatic mechanisms that have a similar concept, but I haven’t seen it pulled off with just a 3D printer. I did a couple more sketches just to think through the concept a little bit more.
And that was all I needed to go off of before jumping into Fusion 360. After a fair amount of fidgeting with the relative heights of all the pieces, I had a model I was ready to print out and see if it worked.
I was a bit nervous to see how the test print would come out, because the track piece has 18 pillars that all need to print in place on top of a large block of supports, but thankfully it turned out great on the first try. The base took about 10 hours to print and the track took about 13 hours. Here’s a cross-section of the internal mechanism:
And some fancy blueprint art I made for fun:
And some photos of the print:
If you’d like to download and print the model yourself, you can do so here: https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-topographic-marble-run-150128