88 Balls of Steel: the Third
By then work had begun on the machine. I should say that Time Lord did most of the work, because the machine was set up in his dining room. All the sawing, drilling, painting, and construction went on in there…he (and his wife) made a big sacrifice!
We ended up using quite a bit of wood, a huge plastic sack of giant Lego’s, and a lot of metal tracking…and our 88 balls of steel. Timing it around other commitments, like two of us being in a play, one working out of town, and the other…well, we’re not sure what happened to him. Have you ever seen the movie Summer School? In it, one big jock gets a bathroom pass on the first day, never shows up again, and gets a B+ on the exam at the end.
That’s sorta like the fourth guy.
He showed up a couple of times, said “I’ve got a great idea for the two most exciting elements of the machine, I’ll take care of it.” Of course, he didn’t tell us what those were, and then he disappeared for two weeks!
In the end, however, just like the big jock, he came through…he showed up the last two sessions and built the last parts of the machine. Awesome!
We had some core ideas we wanted to make sure to complete in the three weeks we had to do this.
- The radio-controlled Delorian would be remotely triggered by a ball rolling into the Hill Valley Courthouse,
- The machine would run “backward” (left to right, from the viewer’s perspective, rather than right to left, which was the direction of the chain),
- We’d use 88 balls,
- Lightning would strike the courthouse as the car was racing toward the end of the table,
- The car would “disappear” off the table and leave a streak of fire behind it,
- And, the most complex, was that at the beginning only two large balls would be visible, the other 86 were hidden. We would form the illusion that one ball turned into several, and those into even more, and those into more, like splitting atoms. Then at the end we’d recombine the mass of balls into the single large ball again, which would trigger the end of the machine.
Yeah, we’re concept guys.
So, in the next post you get some photos of the machine (I didn’t take any in-progress photos, so you just get the finished deal).