Gravity Marble Run

I'm following directions to each item on each page, but it seems like it is a little off. I haven't finished it as yet. The part that is suppose to hold the marbles seems to be too close to the frame, and gets stuck when I turn the motor on. Have I missed something? Otherwise, it is truly a fun project and I hope to finish it soon.

I became hooked on building 3-D puzzles and I’ve done some 40 of them. I believe WoodTrick has the most elaborate and perhaps the best made puzzles I’ve done. I believe the basic understanding one must have in building wooden puzzles is they are going to need some adjusting, tweaking and even some alterations before they will perform as they are “designed” to. While they may be well designed and made they are still made of wood which can expand or contract just a bit to affect their function. That all being said, of all the puzzles I’ve done, from the small, less well made, to the large, or well made, they all need some adjustment and in some cases in the end the use of a cement to hold pieces/parts in their position or additional hand made pieces. To eliminate the marbles running off the rails at times I installed a few guard rails on mine you’ll see in my video. The most important thing I’ve found is anything mechanical, whether it turns, spins, moves up and down, the parts that move against each other must be smooth removing any jagged edges, corners etc. otherwise it may actually lock up and stop potentially putting stress on the entire unit. With this puzzle the part that needed to most attention was the mechanism at the very bottom that releases the marbles one by one to the elevator. That unit MUST move “freely” completely from top to bottom and tested before continuing the rest of the puzzle. Secondly the elevator assembly requires complete free movement during operation. Once you have those two mechanisms operating right the rest will fall into place. Since I have an inventory of marbles I also changed the marbles exchanging them for ones I felt are more colorful making them easier to see. This puzzle is the longest time wise I’ve built, estimating some 12hrs to complete but when you enjoy building as I do you’ll definitely enjoy this build.

I really enjoy building this puzzle. I have purchased it several times.