Wooden marble run

This is a marble run made for as a gift. The inspiration was from a part of Mathias Wandel's marble machine 1. Mine resembles a small part of his.

Wood : Finger jointed rubber, 18mm for the base of the slide and 12 mm for the sides.

Individual slide : As I did no have the right router bit, I used thin strips of 12 mm finger jointed wood. The sides were rounded off using my router. The marbles tended to overshoot the ends  and hence a block to stop it from falling over.

Gluing up the individual slides of the marble run.

The individual slides in different stages of assembly.

 base : Made from 18mm finger joinged wood. This was rounded off on the upper surface.

When the run was in action, the marbles kept running all over the floor and one had to fish them out from under the bed and tables. Thus I added a small fence like thing on the base to keep the marbles in place.

Vertical Pillars : made from 18 mm finger jointed wood. Each slide was screwed on  using two screws on each side. The screws looked a bit unsightly, so I added a thin piece of wood on the pillars to hide the screws. This was pasted on. From the inner surface of the pillars,  two screws attached it to a broad foot. This was screwed on from the under side of the base.

The finished product : I took a video of it in action, however there is a lot of noise from the ceiling fan. I need to work on my shooting skills.

Finished marble run made of finger jointed rubber. 

Drying wood indoors

I had bought a lot of wood for building a bunk bed. One of the problems I faced was that the wood was really wet, even wet to the touch. It was straight out of the tree. With temperatures reaching 45 degrees centigrade in Vellore, drying the wood outside, though tempting resulted in cracks. So this wood was dried indoors, before planing. This is karuvelum wood or the Indian Babul. I stacked up the wood indoors and put on the fan. It dried a lot over a week. The pile of wood on the left is the wood stacked for drying. The previous lot of wood, already dried is seen piled up on the right.

This is by no means the correct way to dry wood. Wood is supposed to dry slowly, over a period of months to a year, with the humidity controlled. But this was my only option. 

Karuvelum (Babul) wood stacked indoors for drying. To the right is seen wood already dried, piled up close together.

Cracks in wood

 One of the problems that I have been facing is the many cracks that develop in wood as it dries. I have been planning to use karuvelam wood (babul) for making a bunk bed. Drying it outside caused cracks at the end. From what I have read this seems to be due to drying too fast. (Vellore now has temperatures above 40 degrees Centigrade). I plan to dry it indoors so that the process is a little slower and see if this helps.

Cracks that developed in Babul wood on drying rapidly (karuvelam wood)

(This is my first post using windows live writer)