Spiral marble elevator with simple run

This marble machine is for 25mm steel balls.

Scale down if needed, or scale up for larger ping pong balls.

The elevator consists of a fixed spiral and a rotating shovel. Works very well.

The attached motor is optional. Mounts for both a standard size or a micro servo are included. Servos need to be converted to contiual motion. I drive mine through a DC/DC voltage converter to produce ca 1.8V from a 5V USB supply. It can of course run at 5V too, but that seems to hectic :-)

To do save electricity, a manual crank is also included.

All components designed in FreeCAD.

The floor plate was designed as a massive slab, but then fine tuned in prusaslicer, so that the infil is exposed:

• 0 top and bottom layers,
• select Honecomb infill pattern
• test with a small block around 10.8% infill so that the 7mm posts can be nicely pushed into the holes.

The actual tracks are cut from 1.75mm filament and snapped into the support arms.

I did not try to print useable 25mm balls myself, as I had these left over of steel balls from another project. (Maybe print two hemisperes, and glue them together....)

Category: Mechanical Toys