I’ve made two bamboo rolling ball sculptures. They were both made in the same way. I stripped the plastic coating off garden wire and then used pliers to tighten a loop round the skewers. The wire cuts into the wood slightly giving good grip. However over time the wood slips or the wire snaps. Depending on the location of the join this can be quite tricky!

March 2008 (page 25)

They are a nice blend of the complex and simple and hardly cost anything to make. I’m very proud of them. They were posted on the Make Blog, June 2007. A year and a bit later I received an email from Megan Mansell Williams asking me if I wanted to be in the printed version of Make, of course I did! After exchanging a few emails and a Skype conversation she said she had all she needed. In February I checked the new issue online, and sure enough, I was there!

I found the issue I was featured in a few weeks later in WH Smiths and bought it. £7.99 is quite pricey for a magazine but the content is brilliant. I subscribed and have been a happy reader ever since!

The Original

It was the summer holidays in 2006 and I need something to do. I’d come across rolling ball sculptures online and I wanted to make my own. I must have spotted bamboo skewers at a barbeque or something! On the first web page I made for it I said it took 30+ hours to make. This was probably a considerable underestimate. Nearer 60 I think!

The time it takes for a ball to go from the top to the bottom is about 43 seconds.

Dual-Track

I didn’t intend to build a second one after I finished the first. However,  I was still on holiday and missed not being able to work on it so I started a second one with two tracks instead of one. The area of the base is also smaller so it can fit on a table easier. This leads to a very tight structure with few gaps and it’s trickier to work on.

The effect of multiple balls running down is almost hypnotic (or chaotic!) and it’s very hard to follow a track and know where a ball is going next.

The combined track time is 50 seconds.