Thursday, February 12, 2009

New Desktop

I like new ideas. They take hold in my mind and percolate slowly, but constantly. I was given the idea of making a desktop rbs that tipped back and forth, with the marble rolling back and forth as the track itself tipped up and down. I did make one and it wasn't exactly what I had hoped for. So it sat. I showed it to my machinist, Bill, and he was all for making more of the motor mounts. Who was I to say no? So in a few days I had 8 new motor mounts with very nice machined aluminum center nose pieces.

Last week I went to San Francisco to deliver a sculpture - wall mounted #82;



And, Aaron, the lucky recipient of #82 had three sculptures from Stan Bennett a kinetic artist that lives in Ferndale, Ca. Stan's sculptures used a rotating arm to lift the marbles. Actually they used several in a row to get the balls from the bottom back to the top. I was so impressed with the arms, that I went home and used one of my new motor mounts for this type of lift, the ARM lift.

So here it is. Under the hood, it is still a basic desktop with a tetrahedron frame. But this baby has three tracks, is 26" wide X 18" high X 19" deep and is automatic.


Check out the video:


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Glad to see some updates! There are so many things to enjoy about the desktop with the arm. I'd like to incorporate a collector at some point, and I like the one you've come up with here that just collects two marbles.

The rate of ball collection and dispensing is good, and as I mentioned on Youtube, the lazy speed of the spiral at the bottom is really just perfect.

I like the S curve as well. That was the first thing I ever tried to construct when I set out doing RBS work. It turned out to be a lot harder than I'd assumed! This one of yours came out nicely.

Lots of great stuff to enjoy on this one.