Lost My Marbles

So I'd like to take a trip back in time if I may, to the first Generative Art project. We were all given a sheet of rules and told that we had to follow them. So, being the impressionable student that I am, I made an effort to follow them as carefully as possible. It wasn't until the day we presented that I found out that many of my class mates blatantly ignored these rules, and still had successful projects. I had no problem with most of the rules, however "The machine must run by itself" was the rule that I got hung up on. More on that later. 

I conceived this project by plunging into the memories of my childhood. When I was but a lad, I would take apart old blinds. Due to their concave shape, they carried marbles quite nicely. The blinds were limiting in structural integrity, and I've always wanted to improve upon my childhood techniques. This project was the perfect opportunity. I had a clear objective in mind. I wanted to create a machine that launched marbles through the air slamming into some wind chimes. 

After conceiving this idea, I realized that I would need materials to do this. Money, however, was in short supply, so the first thing I did was clear a spot in my wallet for recites. Here is a list of supplies I acquired and where I got them from:

Home Depot

1 -  10' SCH-40 PVC Pipe

2 - 60° SCH-40 PVC angled couplers 

1 -  Set - Utility funnels

Michael's Art Supply 

4 -  Bags of clear marbles (A LOT of marbles)

Sears Hardware

1 - Wind Chimes (you'd be surprised how hard they were to find in the winter. 3rd try's a charm)

Walmart (The next day)

1 - Auto feeding paintball hopper

My Apartment

1 - Roll - gaffers tape

1 - Roll - electrical tape

2 - Quick clamps

1 - Tripod

After getting these things, I rushed back to the shop at school to give it a try. My concept was to drop all of the marbles in the funnel and let them feed them selfs out into the PVC, then to the coupler, then through the air to the Wind Chimes. Everything worked beautifully ... accept the funnel. After several failed attempts at cutting it up and making holes larger I gave up for the night and went to bed. The next day, I set out to try a new strategy. I got an auto feeding paintball hopper, which is designed to push paintballs out of it into a paintball gun. I thought that this would agitate the marbles enough to keep them from getting stuck. I loaded it up and turned it on. Three marbles came out and then inevitably it jammed. This device that I just spent thirty dollars on ended up keeping me busy for the majority of that night. The problem was the turbine that pushed the marbles out was made out of a flexible rubber and the marbles just got stuck under the blades, which would bend up and try to slide over the heavy glass. This wouldn't do. After fooling around with less permanent solutions, I moved on to the soldering iron. I trimmed the safety end off of a safety pin and soldered the fulcrum to the motor. I then positioned the pins at roughly a 70° angle. This allowed it to turn without jamming. The pins now had a new purpose. Not to push the marbles out of the hole, but to agitate them enough to let gravity do the work without the marbles jamming against the side. Once that problem was solved, it was a simple issue of setting up the pipe and launcher on a slope and hanging the wind chimes in the marbles approximate path. I then had a working marble launching, chime ringing, automatic machine. The last step was returning most of the hardware to their respective stores.

The rules were a pain in the ass, but I still had a lot of fun with it. In a way, it brought me back to my childhood.