Ball Clock II ~ Ball Exit Path

Having mounted the ball racks and able to cycle the balls through the various time configurations it is now necessary to provide a path for the balls to return to the lift.  Tight quarters dictated tight solutions.

In any ball sculpture, people seem to respond to a spiral.  It seemed a good place to put one for the minutes and tens of minutes release.

Forming the spiral was about as much fun as making the lift spiral.  Except that an entry point was needed along the way for the tens balls.

Let’s just say it took more than one attempt to get it working.

A track was also needed to blend the balls back into the lift.

Once the spiral and return track were completed it was time to fire up the clock for the first time.

When a trip ball arrives at the rack, the weight of the ball tilts the release and the balls on the rack exit stage left.  It is necessary to keep the release lever up until all balls have exited.  This is done by the trip ball taking another track down to the next level and along the way releasing the release lever to return to the normal position.  There is timing involve here.  The trip ball cannot restore the release lever too soon.  This was happening with the minutes rack about every tenth time.  Just enough to let me know it was going to be an issue.  The solution was to extend the time it took for the trip ball to reach the release lever.  I had to remake the section going from the minutes to the tens of minutes rack over to increase that time by about 1.5 seconds.  It worked!

Sometimes it is the little things…

Of course there still wasn’t a way to deal with the 1:00 o’clock ball.