Do you remember your carefree childhood days building little marble mazes using cardboard boxes, straws, and other bits and bobs from your kitchen? They were simple little contraptions that brought hours of idle fun. A few days ago, YouTube user Kaplamino published a video of his very own DIY maze, albeit one that’s automated to run on a massive table featuring multiple fidget spinners, domino blocks, a pair of scissors, and a plastic fork.
The course is set up on a tilted plane. Kaplamino notes that because everything has to be triggered by the lightweight marble, all the tricks are very unstable. Kaplamino says the contraption took three months of work, and “probably more than 500 fails.” Most of the fails happened when a component of the course fell down earlier than expected. The maze also harkens to Rube Goldberg machines, which takes something simple like stamping a postcard and makes it a wildly complicated task.
Kaplamino has some neat and clever ways to roll the marble upwards, including the use of springs, magnets, falling weights, and catapults.
The short video is oddly calming and extremely satisfying, especially when the marble lands in the glass cup at the end with such a satisfying cling.
Kaplamino says the entire set-up was held together by the humble glue gun, which is a laudable achievement in my book.
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