Comments on: Because he could. That's why.

Because he could. That's why.

flabdablet — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 06:51:20 -0800

Clockwork - K'nex Ball Machine

By: carter

carter — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:08:45 -0800

Hmm, carter jr. is just about the right age to be getting into something like this ...

By: StickyCarpet

StickyCarpet — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:14:09 -0800

He's using up to many simulation cycles. Now a fly will have to die.

By: Ickster

Ickster — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:17:22 -0800

That's gorgeous. I'd never get anything of any utility done if I could afford that much K'nex/Lego/whatever.

By: TurkishGolds

TurkishGolds — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:17:33 -0800

Awesome. Made better by the fact that it seems to be cramped into a crappy, cluttered apartment.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:20:23 -0800

You can get tons of K'nex for a lot cheaper than retail if you know where to look.

By: carter

carter — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:23:29 -0800

Yup, our local thrift store always has buckets of used K'nex for a few dollars.

By: Lord_Pall

Lord_Pall — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:23:42 -0800

Where should we look?

By: DU

DU — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:25:22 -0800

Thrift stores, flea markets, Freecycle, yard sales, etc. Once you are looking for it, you'll see it everywhere.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:37:26 -0800

K'Nex are awesome. Silly company though. They should have beat Legos with the Mindstorm concept. But then, a bit of glue is all it takes to make Mindstorms compatible with K'Nex, so there is that ;-)

By: Mblue

Mblue — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:37:52 -0800

Sonic lives!

By: notyou

notyou — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:39:59 -0800

Once you are looking for it, you'll see it everywhere. What is true for K'Nex is also true for love.

By: grouse

grouse — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:45:40 -0800

Wow. That is somewhat amazing.

By: explosion

explosion — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:51:13 -0800

Isn't this the entire purpose of K'nex? Granted, it's on a larger scale, but they've sold K'nex roller-coaster kits. The Lego stuff is typically impressive because it's off-label usage, like a Rubik's Cube solver.

By: aramaic

aramaic — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:51:17 -0800

By the end I had to try really hard not to scream at him/her for failing to turn off the room lights completely so that I could watch the LED balls go cruising around in the dark.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:03:09 -0800

a bit of glue is all it takes to make Mindstorms compatible with K'Nex Not even that. K'Nex makes a Lego-alike product that interfaces with both systems. I've never intentionally bought K'Nex "lego" but I've had it show up in lots of Lego I acquired. (BTW, the reason Lego beat K'Nex to Mindstorms is that Mindstorms was based on an MIT program that used Lego and a microcontroller to make a "smart brick".)

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:25:34 -0800

It's good to know all those kids in their 20's who are forced to move back home with their parents are making good use of the time they're spending, waiting for their real lives to start.

By: Nomyte

Nomyte — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:33:34 -0800

That's a mighty fine display of procrastination — and it's only the third week of the new semester!

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:02:07 -0800

By the end I had to try really hard not to scream at him/her for failing to turn off the room lights completely so that I could watch the LED balls go cruising around in the dark. -- Maybe this will help. Someone on reddit asked him to make a darkened room, long exposure and this is the result.

By: grouse

grouse — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:03:36 -0800

It's good to know all those kids in their 20's who are forced to move back home with their parents are making good use of the time they're spending, waiting for their real lives to start. This is real life. There's more to it than work and breeding.

By: stormpooper

stormpooper — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:07:50 -0800

Well it looks like we know what won out in the dating vs K'Nex debate.

By: aramaic

aramaic — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:09:00 -0800

Maybe this will help Eeeeeeeeeeeee...(inhale)...eeeeeeeeeeeeeee! (for future generations, here's an imgur link)

By: carter

carter — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:25:21 -0800

Way back when, that's kind of what I imagined cyberspace to look like.

By: rlk

rlk — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:59:12 -0800

My favorite part is the startling waste of potential energy at 4:35, when a ball follows a rail five feet straight down in less than a second without doing anything interesting. Ball factories always work very hard to convert height into complex motion, but this guy is beyond that. Above it. He sees the negative space and understands that nothing can be an interesting thing too. He is a ball factory zen master.

By: TheRedArmy

TheRedArmy — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:27:34 -0800

Building the K'Nex roller coaster was probably the height of my life's achievement. I have the set again but without instructions and more than likely without a lot of necessary pieces. Such a shame to have peaked so young.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:36:59 -0800

That was beautiful, flabdablet.

By: nostrada

nostrada — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:48:29 -0800

TheRedArmy - and this is why you have kids! The most fun I had, building stuff with my son using K'Nex and of course Thomas' railway kits.

By: Spatch

Spatch — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:41:49 -0800

My fingers reflexively hurt watching this. So many hours snapping hard plastic bits together. That must have been so much fun to build. (I had the K'Nex coaster, too.) The dude gets major points for using a piece of music other than the breakfast theme from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, cos I think that's the usual choice of music for these kinds of things, but I re-watched the video with that song overlaid and it was very very enjoyable indeed.

By: kilozerocharliealphawhiskey

kilozerocharliealphawhiskey — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:26:30 -0800

The dude gets major points for using a piece of music other than the breakfast theme from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Agreed. I felt the music he chose had just the right amount of epic, and just the right amount of whimsy. I think that's what this project is: epic whimsy.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:36:11 -0800

According to that reddit post I linked to above, he wrote the music himself.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 02:08:56 -0800

Roller Coaster, "Hyperspace Training Station", "Big Ball Machine" (my first), and more, are what I've got and built. And some other original things. My notion was always to build a big wall-sized machine that was both entertaining as well as providing the time (by ball placement). But that kind of thing gets readily procrastinated when one is moving between countries every few years, while all the while getting older.