WEEK 2: MAKE A PRESS FIT
CONSTRUCTION KIT
This is Xabier, my
Bostonian 1-year-old nephew.
He is still very young, but as soon as he
understand that the marbles are not something he can eat, I«m gonna introduce him to the amazing
world of Marble Racing. For those that don«t know what I«m referring to, the
idea is: you create a circuit and, similar to how mini golf works, you shoot
the marbles as many times as you need in order to arrive to the finish line. It
gets especially interesting when you have two players and you play in turns in
order to know who wins the race. As a kid I spent endless hours creating marble
circuits in the sand.
My press fit construction fit is a marble
racing circuit. In order to be highly customizable, it consists of three parts:
á Race track: the ÒroadÓ for the marbles. It has holes for the
attachment of the following elements.
á Fences: it
depends on us how difficult we want to make the marble stay in the path (if the
marble goes out of path, you have to start over).
á Obstacles/Surprises:
there is a wide variety of obstacles you can put on
the road.
First, I tested the joints. I did a quick
mock up to test both the horizontal connectors and the perpendicular connectors.
That«s how I got the exact dimensions I was gonna later use in Solidworks.
Before, getting the model
right, I also had to calculate some proportions:
Cutting the pieces:
The result (track, fences, obstacles,
start/finish line):
The first circuit:
And now, let«s all play!
