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Hosted By Creator: @Pi-Guy - Filament Recycling Design Contest
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Building a New Marble Run with a Unique LiftWhen MakerWorld selected us, along with several other talented creators, during the last #KitChallenge for the #RechargeablePowerKit, we knew we wanted to use the opportunity to push ourselves into something we normally would have avoided.
https://makerworld.com/en/models/2698922-giant-s-grove-marble-run#profileId-2991697
Marble runs have always been one of our favorite things to design, but we didn’t want to create another standard marble lift with a giant printed screw pushing marbles to the top. We became obsessed with the idea of using a marble pump system instead, even though they’re notoriously difficult to get working consistently.
One thing we’d encourage other makers to do is participate in those challenge discussions and drop ideas on the posts when they come up. Opportunities like this are really fun because they can push makers into experimenting with concepts they may never have tried otherwise.Inspiration from NatureOur kids have been completely into Minecraft lately. We kept thinking about blocky landscapes and terrain generation, but we didn’t want this to feel like just another square world. That led us toward thinking about hex geometry.
We became fascinated by the natural hex columns found in Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. The shapes almost feel artificial when you first see them, but they’re completely natural formations created by cooling volcanic basalt. When designing the rock formations, we initially tried manually varying the column heights, but it still felt too artificial. Eventually we wrote a small script to help randomize the rock heights so the landscape felt more organic.Credit: Pete Flynn - Google MapsOnce that clicked, we started carrying the hex language through the entire design. The stone base, the tree trunk, the canopy, and even the track structure all follow variations of that same geometric pattern language so the whole model feels connected together.
We wanted it to feel like a strange magical tree growing directly out of a hexagonal rock formation.The Marble Pump ChallengeThe hardest part by far was the lift mechanism.
We originally found inspiration while researching unusual marble lift systems and came across some incredible wooden marble pump builds on YouTube. One of them especially stuck with us because of how elegantly it moved marbles upward without relying on a large auger system.Credit VEProject1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCWnoSamN7gThat started a long process of experimentation. There were a lot of failed iterations trying to figure out the geometry, the timing, the angles, and how to reliably move marbles upward without jams. Tiny angle changes completely changed the reliability of the system.Many test to get smooth motion and marble movement.
Eventually it started to click. Once the geometry finally came together, the system became surprisingly reliable. Even better, the Rechargeable Power Kit’s N20 motor had more than enough power to continuously lift the marbles through the system. Even though the base on this one is large, one of the things we’re most excited about now is how compact this style of lift could be compared to large printed screw elevators. We can already imagine future marble runs using this same concept in completely different ways.Designing for Future ExpansionAnother idea behind Giant’s Grove was designing it more like a platform than a single marble run.
The acrylic tube section was intentionally designed so the internal flow paths could eventually become interchangeable. We plan to release the STEP file soon for the central tree trunk for anyone that wants to create their own designs for the marble path. Our hope is to create alternate internal modules in the future so makers could swap out entirely different marble flow systems while keeping the same outer structure.
That idea of modularity keeps making its way into our projects lately, and we think there’s a lot more room to explore there.
Happy printing!
