@@gibberishname There are more than one kinds of "simple". Having effectively only two moving parts is one kind and it applies to this device... sort of. OTOH count up the number of curves and straight slopes add one for a marble and you have a more realistic idea of the number of moving parts. Now make each of these parts adjustable but adjustment of one changes at least two other parts, and your idea of "simple" becomes a joke. You could make a version of this device that needs no adjustments and works flawlessly every time. It would not look anything like this and would most likely be ugly as sin.
In one of the close up shots you can see where Adam is having the problem (16:30). It looks like inside wire is disconnected. It transitions from one wire to another lower wire. I suspect it is causing the balls to bounce and be unstable at that point.
Nah. Marble sizes today are highly accurate, uniform, and void of flaws that would disrupt a run. The problem is not in the marbles, but lies in the alignment of the track rails. They do need to be finessed a lot if they go out of alignment.
given it sounded like the marbles may be "natural materials" I'd see if it was the same marble or two that are slightly heavier or lighter... thought it could be the total mass of marbles on the run changing the geometry a bit
Story of my life , every single time I try to fix something for someone else, a 5 minute fix turns into an hour or hours ,, it's what the universe gives me for being nice (nice guys always finish last)
@@gfdia35. Funny how “nice guys” seem to have such a victim mentality….. If you don’t genuinely want to be helpful, don’t fake it and resent doing so later.
Hey Adam! Sebastian here, the engineer behind Marbolous. Your unboxing video totally made my day! 😊 Seeing Marbolous come to life like this is awesome. It was definitely a wild ride getting everything just right - those precision welds were no joke! If you're setting it up, that little instruction sheet really is a life- and timesaver. 😉 By the way, we have in the meantime optimized the stainless steel tracks and they run much better now. BR Sebastian PS: Whoever send the MARBOLOUS to Adam (we bet on a KICKSTARTER or INDIEGOGO supporter?) Thanks so much, you are incredible!
I'm glad you showed up, here. There are an awful lot of early commentors that don't seem to understand that it's kinetic art, not an industrial marble delivery mechanism.
@@blindleader42 Hi! Nice to get to know you :-) Indeed we are with MARBOLOUS far, far away from any industrial marble run. For instance our track elements are all stainless steel, laserwelded not any cheap plastic like most available models. If you have ever tried to weld such small parts you do understand how tight tolerancing must be to built a working marble run. Still I guess we need to rework on adjustment instructions. Once understood the adjustment process is easy and fast to handle. But we didn't want to make it too easy for Adam either ;-)
A lot of instructions have digital versions available to download so customers could potentially see how to open the box before they have access to the physical copy.
Something i learned a long time ago: You can make instructions as idiot-proof as you want, but the joke's on you because an idiot won't read the instructions to begin with.
Just watching the problem solving that Adam does here is so calming. This is why I am a member of this channel. If you aren't a patron, you should consider it.
Exactly!, 100% agreed. I love watching the way in which Adam's mind works with how he becomes completely focused on a task in order to figure out a solution. It is both fascinating and calming.
For the eternal tinkerer I think the need to tweak this out of the box is probably just as satisfying as the product working... But I don't think more average consumers would be as tolerant
Honestly i think if Adam has paid money for this thing and he couldn't get a whole video out of him messing with it he probably wouldn't have been forgiving of the product.
I buy 250$ failure, and open at birthday party for my friend, everyone have the same problem, dont work. "You have one job", to make marble go down, and not working, i spend so much money 250$, and so much time and effort, CEO of company take millions of $ and give this shame? This is the flop of the millenium, everyone hit like button here so nobody buy and spend money and have embbersement like i have, shame on company DONT BUY 250$ dont work. I want public apologies to everyone and 2x money back, ceo make that for 15$ and take 225$ in pocket, am gonna sue the company, and everyone do the same.
Indeed part of the whole fascination with MARBOLOUS should be to interact and adjust it - we think this was always the best back in the good old days once we all played with Marble runs. I assume - and there the blame is on us - we need to improve the instruction on how to adjust the marble run in a structured way. This seems to be the whole "problem" for our point of view
Yea I wouldn't be.. a little tweaking.. maybe.. but it should work as it should out of the box. because 250 bucks isn't nothing, and you're allowed to have the expectation that it should work as normal.. it simply should have better tolerances to be more forgiving to failure for a consumer market
Its a very common problem with marble machines. I think the real problem is simply that the track is formed out of steel wire which is kind of springy and is left floating too much in the air.
I think it's commendable of Adam to remain enthused by the product, even after its shortscomings appear. However, while Adam is the perfect person to send a product that needs tweeking, I doubt that many would share his enthusiasm
Having designed one from scratch myself, I found that a source of "random" failures for me was the fact that my marbles (amazon) were not of uniform size. I laser cut a straight track with a slowly widening slot, and ran them down with small bins underneath, thus sorting them by size. then I found the size that worked best and things vastly improved. Your marbles seemed pretty uniform, but worth mentioning for anyone else working on similar projects.
I saw hints in the comments of a couple of these, but I'd begin here: 1. In marble run v2, make the rails slightly further apart to presumably elimnate the chance that the marble would escape sideways due to excessive velocity. 2. Before shipping out sets of balls, build a device at the factory to sort thousands of balls by size. Ship only CLOSE sizes with a given set to reduce inconsistency. 3. Adam, you went right into bending rails--but what if the center tower supporting everything was the only thing misaligned in the beginning? Seems like the start of an endless chase for alignment. :-) Aside from a bubble level which wouldn't seem precise enough, could there be a one-use leveling jig for the customer to use following shipping? Then have three feet on the base to tweak with screws (or just bend the tower), but I'd still argue this could be corrected with suggestion (1). All this is said having never built a marble run, but I've imagined doing so MANY times! :-)
I love marble runs even tabletop ones like that. Now it makes me wonder. If Adam would ever make himself a simiilar style marble run or one on a larger scale that he could make run perfectly.
Watching Adam having to tune it, and then the smile that comes on his face when it's almost right, but not perfect, so he continues to tweak it. As someone with ADHD and a hint of Aspberger's, the delight is awesome. Now I want one!
Mine worked perfectly out the box. The manual has simple troubleshooting steps for these issues. You're supposed to pivot the inner/outer bars as opposed to bending the entire track so much. But this actually looked fun troubleshooting
As an early backer (Kickstarter) and owner of this product, this video was fantastically entertaining to watch. Especially as an "old school" Mythbusters fan as well. A couple of points on the product Adam is testing here: Yes, when I received my copy of the product I did have to adjust the tracks slightly. Interestingly, I had to go through almost the exact same process as Adam did. First, there was an issue of marbles getting stuck. No problem. Found the trouble spot and adjusted the track very slightly to allow the marble to pass unobstructed. I suspect, however, that this adjustment caused the next issue which was marbles falling off the track. Mine only happened to about 1 in 25 marbles though, so I had to really watch closely. Once located, however, I did the same thing as Adam and slightly adjusted the outside rail of the track in order to keep the marble on it. Mine now works with 100% success. I see others below commenting about how easy it should be to make this product better than they believe it is. My only advice is to visit the campaign page and read the project updates. The creators of this product care about so many things and really did their best deliver both their vision and a solid product. So, hopefully as an actual owner of one of the devices I hope this serves as a more solid "review" than the speculators below. :)
Honestly I think that part of the joy of this kind of toy is the satisfaction of tweaking it until you get it to run perfectly and reliably. It's a fidget toy of sorts
Adam, I love your work so much. I think this is one of my favorite videos in the channel, because we can just see your mind working. As a software developer, I just identified completely with what I do everyday
All the marbles are of 3 different sizes that fall through one of 7 places, every time you tweak it you activate 2 other places that allow some of the marbles to fall some of the time...
When I was a kid the science centers and some malls around me had these kinetic pool call sculptures by George Rhoads. I'd watch them for as long as my parents or grandparents patients would last 😂
I used to sell these at work and they would always stop or jump the track at the exact same spots as your did. It’s honestly pretty validating watching Adam make the exact same tweaks to it that I did!
11:05 That exact moment when the marble from below touches the marble from above and eats its momentum, that's hard to time, nice you got that one on camera.
I would of liked different colour marbles, . Adam I didn't see you measure the gap between the rails, does the marble ride higher or lower in the trouble areas?
I had a similar issue with a kit called marble city. It was a mostly wooden one with a crank handle that moved the marbles up a gear lift. It was fun getting it setup and working but due to minor imperfections in the material it took awhile to get it to be consistent.
That machine became a perfect toy for any of us like Adam who likes to manipulate the world and devices around them... :) Making a machine work better, or as perfectly as it is capable of is actually hugely satisfying - this machine went up several notches in entertainment level immediately it had a marble stop somewhere! Cheers from Oz, I really like the manual operation, it's not just a battery powered thing that has no more operator input beyond fitting some batteries - mechanisms that do not use batteries are far too under-rated...
That little bit of sticky that is left from the corner that you initially need to peel up is easily removed by using the sticker itself. Put the sticker back over that small spot and quickly peel it back up a few times and it will remove any left over residue without leaving a single mark. You could also use something like Goo-Gone but then you also need to thoroughly clean it with glass cleaner afterwards.
The slow motion feature built into the camera on your phone could have probably helped you identify where the problem is without relying on the naked eye. You could probably even bank all the corners so the marbles go really fast. That is a very cool gadget.
What ever heartburn the company may have had with Adam immediately tweaking the thing is completely outweighed by him being fascinated and playing with it. I'm not sure there's an amount of money that could have bought that shot.
I enjoyed Adam's enthusiasm even while tuning the track, and catching a bit of a grin cross his face as he pushed the lever down to load more marbles on the track.
“Here’s the model for Adam, we hand fitted the parts to make sure it works for the video”. “What do you mean? I just grabbed one off the shelf and shipped it to him yesterday?” “YOU DID WHAT?!?!”
To avoid 'Newton's cradle', at any given point on the track there must be slope 'downhill' that will cause a marble to start rolling. A tricky point may be that not all marbles are perfectly round
So Adam, did you ever have/play with "Spacewarp"? nylon tubing for tracks, aluminum tubing for vertical supports, plastic yokes and clips and base... infinitely customizable marble run toy. I had a lot of fun with that as a kid, circa early 1980's.
Kudos to Adam for sticking with it, but I witnessed a fatal flaw in his methodology. The unit must be level (consistently) in order for the adjustments to fix the derailments. Where Adam went wrong was his constant moving and rotating of the device while making adjustments. The table only needs to be out of level a tiny bit to throw the whole works off. Set it in one place and don't move it from that surface. Make your adjustments without moving the device or rotating it. It would take a fraction of the time to tweak the rails. Cheers! Zip~
If I order this does my Adam Savage show up in the same box or will I have to pay extra shipping? Plus a friend got one and there no feeding instructions so his Adam only lasted like 3 days so....
Would love to know if the little spheres are UV sensitive. To see what those would look like fluorescing in the dark as they make their way down the track would be awesome.
That awkward moment when you send something to an influential person hoping for a glowing endorsement, and the item craps the bed. So much for that potential sales bump.
It looks like the spot weld in the spot that kept causing droppage had failed. The weld looked like it had failed when it came out of the box. Another possibility is the vibrational frequencies that the traveling marbles were introducing into the rails were tweaking them just enough to cause drops in that particular spot.
This reminds me that you should really do a video with Matthias Wandel. You both deserve visibility to each others' viewers if they aren't already subscribed to one!
This was a kickstarter campaign for forever. I think I received mine almost a year after the campaign closed. Thankfully I didn't have as much trouble with mine as Adam had.
If I had paid for this myself and had this much trouble with it I would've been fuming but watching Adam tinker with it and try to fix it is so entertaining. The duality of content I suppose. Watching it is great, not so much the struggle if it was me.
A friend of mine made a pretty intricate marble run from wood (hardboard) with a laser cutter from a pattern he got online. That might be a pretty fun thing to make if you own one of those.
I saw this toy when I was a child in a gum dispensing machine, you inserted the coin and the gum in the shape of a ball, they rolled from the top to the small door below.
I was waiting for you to insert a screwdriver under the outside of the track and over the inside of the track to bend it upward to give it a little bit more bank in the corners. You ended up doing the same thing with the pliers.
Could it be that you are adjusting the track and inadvertently flattening it at the same time? As in, the inside track needs to be lower at higher speed.
I bought myself a Marbolous just recently and mine worked fine right out of the box without any need for adjustment. The marbles that were sent were all very uniform in size, so the problem Adam was having was probably not variances in marble size as much as slight alignment issues with the track. Maybe Marbolous got better at their process, but all I can say is mine worked like a charm without any need to tweak the rails. Things like this play in my head well. :)
often an objects purpose and actions coincide. For instance, if the goal was a distraction tool for your desk, it works as you were definitely distracted from your primary job. However, if the goal was to create a calm atmosphere for your mind to wander, it may not have reduced your tension level.
If you love marble runs you MUST get a GRAVITRAX set!!! I am 71 and have great fun with it (not to mention the grandchildren). Also, you must get one of the motorized add-on items found on ETSY. Enjoy!
I think the reason you're creating your Newton's Cradle is the weight of multiple marbles on that section is deflecting the track enough to cause them to stall
@@zachmoyer1849 well it was free to someone who is likely in the top 0.1% of enjoyers of this thing, implying that for us regular people it has no value as something that needs to be tinkered with
It's probably a shipping issue. Everything gets tossed around hard by overworked, underpaid warehouse workers because they have to in order to keep the throughput that is asked of them. It doesn't matter if it is labeled fragile or whatever, it's getting yeeted. This is why packing everything properly and tightly with packing material is so important, unfortunately, but people don't generally learn that lesson until they experience it by having something they ship get broken. It's very, very unfortunate. But this isn't actually the manufacturer's fault, beyond "maybe pack it full of packing material". But that has a tradeoff and a risk too - packing that material in, or removing it too vigorously could in itself bend the rails and throw it out of tolerance. It could also be a marble issue, if they have poor tolerances. This is why steel marbles are often better, because they are often literally ball bearings made with incredibly precise tolerances. If it screws up with only a few marbles, you remove them and it should work fine.
What better example of the dichotemy between "good enough" and "perfect". I doubt this could ever be tuned to absolute perfection since tuning for 1 ball at a time might result in multi-ball sticking or the weight of 1 causing another to jump the track, etc. Add in different ball release intervals and the chaos of the real world is shown in all its glory :)
I wonder if part of the problem with the marbles falling off is the diameter of the marbles could be slightly different. don't know if there is a way to isolate which ones are dropping and somehow mark them with a wipeable marker to see if they are always the ones dropping
My heart feels for the company (not too much, for all the reasons everyone else pointed out.. Not a failure of the product, just how finicky it is!), but quite honestly... Turning pliers into no-mar pliers with a little bit of tape?!?!? Mind=blown! That is going in my mental toolbox!
Manufacturer:
"Unboxing video of our product yay!!!"
*sees that it's 20 minutes long*
"Oh no..."
Ha!
For $300 there really is NO EXCUSE for something as simple as this NOT to work out of the box
@@gibberishnameseems you missed a word in there.
@@rasmusvedel haha, thanks. speech to text fail. fixed.
@@gibberishname There are more than one kinds of "simple". Having effectively only two moving parts is one kind and it applies to this device... sort of. OTOH count up the number of curves and straight slopes add one for a marble and you have a more realistic idea of the number of moving parts. Now make each of these parts adjustable but adjustment of one changes at least two other parts, and your idea of "simple" becomes a joke. You could make a version of this device that needs no adjustments and works flawlessly every time. It would not look anything like this and would most likely be ugly as sin.
My two cents: the marbles have large enough differences in weight, diameter and "roundness" that tuning this thing to perfection is a wild goose chase
In one of the close up shots you can see where Adam is having the problem (16:30). It looks like inside wire is disconnected. It transitions from one wire to another lower wire. I suspect it is causing the balls to bounce and be unstable at that point.
@@dodaexploda I totally forgot that aspect you are right. My point still stands imo
He lost his marbles😂
@@robinmaurer2645 your point absolutely still stands and is a potential issues.
Nah. Marble sizes today are highly accurate, uniform, and void of flaws that would disrupt a run. The problem is not in the marbles, but lies in the alignment of the track rails. They do need to be finessed a lot if they go out of alignment.
Frustrating trying to troubleshoot something when the failure isn't consistent
personally it would be but watching adam do it is quite satisfying
given it sounded like the marbles may be "natural materials" I'd see if it was the same marble or two that are slightly heavier or lighter... thought it could be the total mass of marbles on the run changing the geometry a bit
Story of my life , every single time I try to fix something for someone else, a 5 minute fix turns into an hour or hours ,, it's what the universe gives me for being nice (nice guys always finish last)
I have to believe that you have a couple of marbles that are ever so slightly larger or heavier.
@@gfdia35. Funny how “nice guys” seem to have such a victim mentality…..
If you don’t genuinely want to be helpful, don’t fake it and resent doing so later.
Hey Adam! Sebastian here, the engineer behind Marbolous. Your unboxing video totally made my day! 😊 Seeing Marbolous come to life like this is awesome. It was definitely a wild ride getting everything just right - those precision welds were no joke! If you're setting it up, that little instruction sheet really is a life- and timesaver. 😉 By the way, we have in the meantime optimized the stainless steel tracks and they run much better now.
BR Sebastian
PS: Whoever send the MARBOLOUS to Adam (we bet on a KICKSTARTER or INDIEGOGO supporter?) Thanks so much, you are incredible!
I'm glad you showed up, here. There are an awful lot of early commentors that don't seem to understand that it's kinetic art, not an industrial marble delivery mechanism.
@@blindleader42 Hi! Nice to get to know you :-) Indeed we are with MARBOLOUS far, far away from any industrial marble run. For instance our track elements are all stainless steel, laserwelded not any cheap plastic like most available models. If you have ever tried to weld such small parts you do understand how tight tolerancing must be to built a working marble run. Still I guess we need to rework on adjustment instructions. Once understood the adjustment process is easy and fast to handle. But we didn't want to make it too easy for Adam either ;-)
I was anxious just watching the instructions being totally ignored
@@rondavis3232 :D we too
I almost guarantee he didn't set it on the most level surface ever. Since he rotated the fixture and had different results. Kind of a giveaway
I love how the first instruction in the manual is how to open the box… that also contains the instruction manual 😂
A lot of instructions have digital versions available to download so customers could potentially see how to open the box before they have access to the physical copy.
@@ObsessiveGeekYou shouldn’t need instructions on how to open a box. Digital or physical.
Something i learned a long time ago: You can make instructions as idiot-proof as you want, but the joke's on you because an idiot won't read the instructions to begin with.
Just watching the problem solving that Adam does here is so calming. This is why I am a member of this channel. If you aren't a patron, you should consider it.
Exactly!, 100% agreed. I love watching the way in which Adam's mind works with how he becomes completely focused on a task in order to figure out a solution. It is both fascinating and calming.
For the eternal tinkerer I think the need to tweak this out of the box is probably just as satisfying as the product working... But I don't think more average consumers would be as tolerant
Honestly i think if Adam has paid money for this thing and he couldn't get a whole video out of him messing with it he probably wouldn't have been forgiving of the product.
I buy 250$ failure, and open at birthday party for my friend, everyone have the same problem, dont work. "You have one job", to make marble go down, and not working, i spend so much money 250$, and so much time and effort, CEO of company take millions of $ and give this shame? This is the flop of the millenium, everyone hit like button here so nobody buy and spend money and have embbersement like i have, shame on company DONT BUY 250$ dont work. I want public apologies to everyone and 2x money back, ceo make that for 15$ and take 225$ in pocket, am gonna sue the company, and everyone do the same.
Indeed part of the whole fascination with MARBOLOUS should be to interact and adjust it - we think this was always the best back in the good old days once we all played with Marble runs. I assume - and there the blame is on us - we need to improve the instruction on how to adjust the marble run in a structured way. This seems to be the whole "problem" for our point of view
Yea I wouldn't be.. a little tweaking.. maybe.. but it should work as it should out of the box. because 250 bucks isn't nothing, and you're allowed to have the expectation that it should work as normal.. it simply should have better tolerances to be more forgiving to failure for a consumer market
Its a very common problem with marble machines. I think the real problem is simply that the track is formed out of steel wire which is kind of springy and is left floating too much in the air.
I love the fact that the instructions on how to safely remove the product from the box is placed inside that box! Genius!
Seeing Adam's face contort as the thought " oooo a problem to solve " hits is amazing.
I'm losing my marbles just watching this.
Well done.
Adam almost lost some too :)
Love how you got more enjoyment out of fixing this than the thing working perfectly.
Well, there's not that much joy in it when it works perfectly and tinkering is its own joy. So yeah.
I think it's commendable of Adam to remain enthused by the product, even after its shortscomings appear.
However, while Adam is the perfect person to send a product that needs tweeking, I doubt that many would share his enthusiasm
Let's send him a plank of wood and a spool of solderable wire and call it a diy marble run kit. Bet he'll love it.
Why should he be enthused by something so crap?
Having designed one from scratch myself, I found that a source of "random" failures for me was the fact that my marbles (amazon) were not of uniform size. I laser cut a straight track with a slowly widening slot, and ran them down with small bins underneath, thus sorting them by size. then I found the size that worked best and things vastly improved. Your marbles seemed pretty uniform, but worth mentioning for anyone else working on similar projects.
Spreading the tracks apart just a bit will help slow the marbles down. That’s a cool piece of art
RUclips at its best: Watch someone buy something I can't afford and then fix it in a way I wouldn't want to. My brain is happy!
Adam didn't buy it. It was just sent to him for free. No note included or anything.
"Fascination knows no age" --Insert screenshot of Adam's face when he's working on it 😁😁😁
I saw hints in the comments of a couple of these, but I'd begin here:
1. In marble run v2, make the rails slightly further apart to presumably elimnate the chance that the marble would escape sideways due to excessive velocity.
2. Before shipping out sets of balls, build a device at the factory to sort thousands of balls by size. Ship only CLOSE sizes with a given set to reduce inconsistency.
3. Adam, you went right into bending rails--but what if the center tower supporting everything was the only thing misaligned in the beginning? Seems like the start of an endless chase for alignment. :-) Aside from a bubble level which wouldn't seem precise enough, could there be a one-use leveling jig for the customer to use following shipping? Then have three feet on the base to tweak with screws (or just bend the tower), but I'd still argue this could be corrected with suggestion (1).
All this is said having never built a marble run, but I've imagined doing so MANY times! :-)
I love marble runs even tabletop ones like that. Now it makes me wonder. If Adam would ever make himself a simiilar style marble run or one on a larger scale that he could make run perfectly.
Yeah it'd be great to see Adam make his own. Would show us many small maker skills like soldering and problem solving
*David Morrell - Rolling Ball Sculptures*
You’re welcome
Watching Adam having to tune it, and then the smile that comes on his face when it's almost right, but not perfect, so he continues to tweak it. As someone with ADHD and a hint of Aspberger's, the delight is awesome. Now I want one!
Funnily enough the fact that Adam had to fix a faulty product probably gave him more fun engagement with it than if he just unboxed it and it worked 😂
Love the entusiasm and joy in your eyes when it all works out ❤
Mine worked perfectly out the box. The manual has simple troubleshooting steps for these issues. You're supposed to pivot the inner/outer bars as opposed to bending the entire track so much. But this actually looked fun troubleshooting
So half way through the tweaking, I would hear my wife's voice telling me, "Why don't you read the manual."
Hey, Boss. This one I can't fix.
- Send it to Tested.
But it's not working?
- He'll fix it for the video.
As a joke?
- Sure.
haha, indeed. 😂
the plier set you where using to adjust the marble run is one of my favorite sets. That set has so many good plier angles to use, worth every penny.
There is so much empathy with Adam watching this.
As an early backer (Kickstarter) and owner of this product, this video was fantastically entertaining to watch. Especially as an "old school" Mythbusters fan as well. A couple of points on the product Adam is testing here:
Yes, when I received my copy of the product I did have to adjust the tracks slightly. Interestingly, I had to go through almost the exact same process as Adam did. First, there was an issue of marbles getting stuck. No problem. Found the trouble spot and adjusted the track very slightly to allow the marble to pass unobstructed. I suspect, however, that this adjustment caused the next issue which was marbles falling off the track. Mine only happened to about 1 in 25 marbles though, so I had to really watch closely. Once located, however, I did the same thing as Adam and slightly adjusted the outside rail of the track in order to keep the marble on it. Mine now works with 100% success.
I see others below commenting about how easy it should be to make this product better than they believe it is. My only advice is to visit the campaign page and read the project updates. The creators of this product care about so many things and really did their best deliver both their vision and a solid product. So, hopefully as an actual owner of one of the devices I hope this serves as a more solid "review" than the speculators below. :)
Not sure if I should feel more or less nerdy that Adam also got excited about the cardboard quality and packaging
To watch Adam in joyful fascination was a lovely moment to see. True to thought, fascination knows no age.
Videos like this where you're clearly still a kid at heart are some of my favorite!
Honestly I think that part of the joy of this kind of toy is the satisfaction of tweaking it until you get it to run perfectly and reliably. It's a fidget toy of sorts
Adjustment like this is basically what I do for a living on mechanical packing machines lol. Its so frustrating when only one in 100 fail
Very satisfying sound of the marbles rolling down the track
Adam, I love your work so much. I think this is one of my favorite videos in the channel, because we can just see your mind working.
As a software developer, I just identified completely with what I do everyday
I cannot see or say the word "Fragile" in my head without going "It must be Italian."
Same with "ESCAPE"... hey, that's spelled just like "escape!"
All the marbles are of 3 different sizes that fall through one of 7 places, every time you tweak it you activate 2 other places that allow some of the marbles to fall some of the time...
When I was a kid the science centers and some malls around me had these kinetic pool call sculptures by George Rhoads.
I'd watch them for as long as my parents or grandparents patients would last 😂
I think it's because it is such a nice looking object that Adam really took the time to tune it. Nice job.
The look on your face at 18:06 after all the persistence and tweaking of the marble run. It just shows. You were _that_ kid. You were me.
Adam Savage may be the only person on the whole planet saying "I don't want a Newton's cradle" while playing with some marbles :D
I used to sell these at work and they would always stop or jump the track at the exact same spots as your did. It’s honestly pretty validating watching Adam make the exact same tweaks to it that I did!
This is the perfect gift for you. You get to problem solve and tinker then enjoy.
Watching Adam get mesmerized by a thing you built must be one of the coolest feelings on the planet
11:05 That exact moment when the marble from below touches the marble from above and eats its momentum, that's hard to time, nice you got that one on camera.
I suggest marking some of the marbles that fall off and see if they are always the same ones with issues.
Maybe the glass is there to catch marbles that jump off the track.
Ya think?
I would of liked different colour marbles, . Adam I didn't see you measure the gap between the rails, does the marble ride higher or lower in the trouble areas?
I had a similar issue with a kit called marble city. It was a mostly wooden one with a crank handle that moved the marbles up a gear lift. It was fun getting it setup and working but due to minor imperfections in the material it took awhile to get it to be consistent.
That machine became a perfect toy for any of us like Adam who likes to manipulate the world and devices around them... :) Making a machine work better, or as perfectly as it is capable of is actually hugely satisfying - this machine went up several notches in entertainment level immediately it had a marble stop somewhere! Cheers from Oz, I really like the manual operation, it's not just a battery powered thing that has no more operator input beyond fitting some batteries - mechanisms that do not use batteries are far too under-rated...
I feel like part of the fun is in tuning it correctly. You can tell Adam enjoys it.
I can’t believe I’ve spent 9 minutes watching a dude troubleshoot a marble run toy, and it looks like I’m gonna be spending 10 more
That little bit of sticky that is left from the corner that you initially need to peel up is easily removed by using the sticker itself. Put the sticker back over that small spot and quickly peel it back up a few times and it will remove any left over residue without leaving a single mark.
You could also use something like Goo-Gone but then you also need to thoroughly clean it with glass cleaner afterwards.
The slow motion feature built into the camera on your phone could have probably helped you identify where the problem is without relying on the naked eye. You could probably even bank all the corners so the marbles go really fast. That is a very cool gadget.
What ever heartburn the company may have had with Adam immediately tweaking the thing is completely outweighed by him being fascinated and playing with it. I'm not sure there's an amount of money that could have bought that shot.
I'm way more impressed by the plier 9:44 that Adam uses to fix the toy than by the toy itself. now I need those pliers
ooh Adam .... i loved watching your eyes back n forth following the marbles! so fun!
I enjoyed Adam's enthusiasm even while tuning the track, and catching a bit of a grin cross his face as he pushed the lever down to load more marbles on the track.
“Here’s the model for Adam, we hand fitted the parts to make sure it works for the video”.
“What do you mean? I just grabbed one off the shelf and shipped it to him yesterday?”
“YOU DID WHAT?!?!”
@@g60force Yikes..
Yet Adam is beside himself! "Oooo... I have a tool for that!" LOL
I love the concept. Too bad it needed so many tweaks though. One problem creates another problem that creates another problem...augh.
To avoid 'Newton's cradle', at any given point on the track there must be slope 'downhill' that will cause a marble to start rolling. A tricky point may be that not all marbles are perfectly round
I was wondering if it wasn't specific marbles, because it wasn't happening every time.
So Adam, did you ever have/play with "Spacewarp"? nylon tubing for tracks, aluminum tubing for vertical supports, plastic yokes and clips and base... infinitely customizable marble run toy. I had a lot of fun with that as a kid, circa early 1980's.
Kudos to Adam for sticking with it, but I witnessed a fatal flaw in his methodology. The unit must be level (consistently) in order for the adjustments to fix the derailments. Where Adam went wrong was his constant moving and rotating of the device while making adjustments. The table only needs to be out of level a tiny bit to throw the whole works off. Set it in one place and don't move it from that surface. Make your adjustments without moving the device or rotating it. It would take a fraction of the time to tweak the rails. Cheers! Zip~
As an engineer, I was (almost) screaming at the screen- No! Not that! Bend THAT!!!"
If I order this does my Adam Savage show up in the same box or will I have to pay extra shipping? Plus a friend got one and there no feeding instructions so his Adam only lasted like 3 days so....
Honestly, it’s one of the most interesting and unique puzzles out there.
Would love to know if the little spheres are UV sensitive. To see what those would look like fluorescing in the dark as they make their way down the track would be awesome.
That awkward moment when you send something to an influential person hoping for a glowing endorsement, and the item craps the bed. So much for that potential sales bump.
It looks like the spot weld in the spot that kept causing droppage had failed. The weld looked like it had failed when it came out of the box. Another possibility is the vibrational frequencies that the traveling marbles were introducing into the rails were tweaking them just enough to cause drops in that particular spot.
Was also thinking about the marketing department going trough all the emotions watching this
This is so a one day build. So many things to show off, simply remarkable
This reminds me that you should really do a video with Matthias Wandel. You both deserve visibility to each others' viewers if they aren't already subscribed to one!
This was a kickstarter campaign for forever. I think I received mine almost a year after the campaign closed. Thankfully I didn't have as much trouble with mine as Adam had.
If I had paid for this myself and had this much trouble with it I would've been fuming but watching Adam tinker with it and try to fix it is so entertaining.
The duality of content I suppose. Watching it is great, not so much the struggle if it was me.
A friend of mine made a pretty intricate marble run from wood (hardboard) with a laser cutter from a pattern he got online. That might be a pretty fun thing to make if you own one of those.
I saw this toy when I was a child in a gum dispensing machine, you inserted the coin and the gum in the shape of a ball, they rolled from the top to the small door below.
I was waiting for you to insert a screwdriver under the outside of the track and over the inside of the track to bend it upward to give it a little bit more bank in the corners. You ended up doing the same thing with the pliers.
Could it be that you are adjusting the track and inadvertently flattening it at the same time? As in, the inside track needs to be lower at higher speed.
I bought myself a Marbolous just recently and mine worked fine right out of the box without any need for adjustment. The marbles that were sent were all very uniform in size, so the problem Adam was having was probably not variances in marble size as much as slight alignment issues with the track. Maybe Marbolous got better at their process, but all I can say is mine worked like a charm without any need to tweak the rails. Things like this play in my head well. :)
often an objects purpose and actions coincide. For instance, if the goal was a distraction tool for your desk, it works as you were definitely distracted from your primary job. However, if the goal was to create a calm atmosphere for your mind to wander, it may not have reduced your tension level.
I love the enjoyment he gets with problem solving!
The purrrfect toy for Adam... one that he must tinker and fiddle with to make it work how he wants.
That company went from the highest of highs with Adam’s appreciation of their packaging, to the lowest of lows for the performance of their product.
Adam tinkering with this marble run is very much up his alley
If you love marble runs you MUST get a GRAVITRAX set!!! I am 71 and have great fun with it (not to mention the grandchildren). Also, you must get one of the motorized add-on items found on ETSY. Enjoy!
There are 3d printed versions of these which does not require tuning.
Would it be possible to change the camber of some of the turns? So a twist to raise the outer rail only? That would have been my guess.
I NEED THIS... for.. legitimate reasons... That will become evident.
I think part of the fun is figuring it out and tweaking it. Im going to hint to my wife to get me one for Father's day.
Maybe the endless adjustment process is the product. It's like a puzzle!
They should have made a mechanism where you wind it up and each marble reaching the bottom would trigger the elevator to start the next one
The “Hey hey hey … doot” moment really resonated with me 🤣
That thing could keep my cat amussed for hours!
Adam, I'd like to see if you replaced those plastic balls with metal bearings, would their increased weight give them the momentum to make it through?
I think the reason you're creating your Newton's Cradle is the weight of multiple marbles on that section is deflecting the track enough to cause them to stall
Something that is $315 and supposed to work straight out of the box yet needing any sort of tool by the owner to fix... hard pass.
what would you pay?
Basically none of these work out of the box.
@@zachmoyer1849 well it was free to someone who is likely in the top 0.1% of enjoyers of this thing, implying that for us regular people it has no value as something that needs to be tinkered with
It's $250 for the design.
It's probably a shipping issue. Everything gets tossed around hard by overworked, underpaid warehouse workers because they have to in order to keep the throughput that is asked of them. It doesn't matter if it is labeled fragile or whatever, it's getting yeeted.
This is why packing everything properly and tightly with packing material is so important, unfortunately, but people don't generally learn that lesson until they experience it by having something they ship get broken.
It's very, very unfortunate. But this isn't actually the manufacturer's fault, beyond "maybe pack it full of packing material". But that has a tradeoff and a risk too - packing that material in, or removing it too vigorously could in itself bend the rails and throw it out of tolerance.
It could also be a marble issue, if they have poor tolerances. This is why steel marbles are often better, because they are often literally ball bearings made with incredibly precise tolerances. If it screws up with only a few marbles, you remove them and it should work fine.
What better example of the dichotemy between "good enough" and "perfect".
I doubt this could ever be tuned to absolute perfection since tuning for 1 ball at a time might result in multi-ball sticking or the weight of 1 causing another to jump the track, etc.
Add in different ball release intervals and the chaos of the real world is shown in all its glory :)
I wonder if part of the problem with the marbles falling off is the diameter of the marbles could be slightly different. don't know if there is a way to isolate which ones are dropping and somehow mark them with a wipeable marker to see if they are always the ones dropping
I could watch marble runs all day long.
My heart feels for the company (not too much, for all the reasons everyone else pointed out.. Not a failure of the product, just how finicky it is!), but quite honestly... Turning pliers into no-mar pliers with a little bit of tape?!?!? Mind=blown! That is going in my mental toolbox!