Small children are often very enthusiastic about rolling balls and the laws of gravity. With a self-made wooden ball track you create a fascinating toy.
What you need:
- Square sticks (about 2 cm thick, four or more, 25 to 50 cm long)
- Wood for fretwork (about 2 mm thick, amount depends on the choice of square timber, min. 30 x 30 cm)
- jigsaw
- Milling machine (for holes about 1.5 cm in diameter)
- sandpaper
- Holzleim
- Marbles (maximum 1.3 cm in diameter)
You have to work very precisely on the marble run so that the marbles can roll properly through the channels. If you don’t have a milling cutter, you can also use a suitably shaped file. However, this increases the workload enormously.
Manufacture the runners for the ball track
- Mill a semi-circular groove into each square piece of wood on one long side.
- Using the router attachment, drill a hole in each end of the wood. Start on the rounded side.
- Lay all the logs next to each other in the same direction. The holes are on your left, with the chute facing away from you.
- Move the timbers so that the rectangle formed by the gutters tilts slightly to the right. (Inclined at an angle of about 5-10°)
- Draw the line of the imaginary rectangle at the ends and cut all the pieces of wood accordingly.
- Sand the chutes as smooth as possible.
Determine the dimensions for the wooden frame and cut to size
- Lay out the gutters in front of you as you would when cutting them to size.
- Flip every other gutter so the hole is on the left.
- Now incline the wooden gutters so that the beveled edge is parallel on all of them.
- Increase each smaller distance to three centimeters without changing the angle.
- Now measure the height of the ball track. (Consider an inch of space under the last gutter.)
- From the fretwork, cut six straight strips the width of the gutters, as long as the determined height.
- Saw a floorboard that is a little longer and about three times as wide as the runners.
- You need strips about two centimeters wide for the edge of the base plate.
Glue the wooden ball track together
- Glue one of the strips of wood to the sloping sides of the gutters.
- Make sure to keep the distances.
- Reinforce this connection with two strips each, which are glued to the ends from the right and left.
- Glue the edge strips for the floor panel to this.
- Attach the ball track to the base plate. (The remnants of the square timber provide additional stability if they are glued to the ball track and base plate.)
- Once all the connections have dried, the marble can be placed on the top gutter.
- This now rolls down and falls through the holes at the lower end onto the next chute.
