Fun for the whole family

Jacqueline Segeth from the Netherlands build our GBC 41 Power Pit Mania together with her husband and son-in-law and even grandson;) A great team effort for sure.
See for yourself in the video what they accomplished and what they wrote as a review. Thanks for sharing!

 

GBC 41 Power Pit Mania - 42100 Building Instructions

Jacqueline Segeth - May 17, 2024


As with the GBC 45, I built the GBC 41 on my own, in a week or two. The track worked well straight away, but because we don't have that many balls we had to fill the tipping box with stones. My husband did that job. Then there's driving the bulldozer, which is more something for my son-in-law. A question that requires a lot of practice. Our grandson also adds a ball in his own way :). Teamwork! See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTmaRCjw7Ww Net als bij de GBC 45 heb ik de GBC 41 alleen gebouwd, in een week of twee. De baan werkte meteen goed maar omdat we niet zoveel balletjes hebben moesten we de kiepbak vullen met steentjes. Dat klusje heeft mijn man geklaard. Dan nog het besturen van de bulldozer, dat is meer iets voor mijn schoonzoon. Een questie van veel oefenen. Onze kleinzoon voegt op zijn manier ook een balletje toe :). Teamwork! Zie video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTmaRCjw7Ww

 

 


Have you also build one of our models yourself?

GBC 53 Marble Music Machine is finally out

Create music on your own with help of our latest GBC 53 Marble Music Machine! Pins on a programming wheel push hammers which push GBC Balls onto Xylophone Keys, hence making sounds. When composing correctly you can hear beautiful melodies from the machine. All on it’s own!!
Created entirely from the LEGO 42146 Liebherr Crawler Crane LR 13000 set! Learn about engineering, mechanics, music, programming and so much more!
The machine can be programmed via the LEGO Powered Up App or Pybricks.

 

 

Philip Interviewed in Podcast

Recently Philip had been interviewed by a Dutch podcast maker “Men with a hobby” where 3 guys ask other men about their hobby and if it is something for them. They asked Philip what Great Ball Contraptions (GBCs) are exactly, how he got started, what is so cool about it and so much more. They were fascinated by it and in the end they promised they will build a GBC themselves. GBC, the greatest hobby there is ;)

 

Start Podcast

 

Check out their website for even more hobbies (Dutch only)

 

 

 

Fun Fact: GBC 53 Marble Music Machine

Fun Fact


Wow, the LEGO 42146 set is big. And a lot of parts. But when you look closer you will realize something. Many of the included parts are big frames which are useful for building big. But not so useful for building small detailed mechanisms. Making this music machine required us to play 8 notes. So every mechanism that you come up with has to be multiplied by 8. This gave us the biggest challenge of all. So first you have to come up with a working mechanism and then design it in such way that it can by copied 8 times. In the mechanism you see we had to squeeze every little bit out of every part to get the GBC 53 Marble Music Machine working. To give you an idea: there are only 12 axle extenders in a set with over 2883 parts in total. It was challenging but we succeeded.

 

GBC 53 Marble Music Machine – 42146 Alternate Build

Module in the Wild

It is always great to see parts of our GBCs in the wild.
During the Brixembourg GBC layout (Luxembourg) we can see part of our GBC 41 Power Pit Mania build from the LEGO 42100 Liebherr R 9800 set.

We don’t know exactly who build it but for sure some member of the GBC group. The big Wheel Loader Module has the important job to create some height gain with a consistent ball flow to the next module.

 

Learn more about Brixembourg events

 

 


Have you also build one of our models yourself?

Our 32 Byte LEGO storage device

A little Geek Speak: A Bit (binary digit) is the smallest unit of data that a computer can process and store. A Bit is always in one of two physical states, similar to an on/off light switch. The state is represented by a single binary value, usually a 0 or 1. However, the state might also be represented by yes/no, on/off or true/false or, as in our case, black Technic pin/no black Technic pin.

The Programing Wheel consists out of 32 rows where we can attach 8 pins on each. This makes a total of 32 x 8 = 256 pins which is 256 Bits.
As you know that 1 Byte stores 8 Bits, we can conclude that the Programming Wheel holds 256 / 8 = 32 Bytes.
To put things in perspective.
– Popular 3.5 inch Floppy Disk (Saving icon) holds 1.474.560 Bytes
– 1 GB USB Stick holds 1.000.000.000 Bytes 🤯
– 4 minute song is 44,336,000 Bytes

Our Programming Wheel is by today’s standard not the most efficient way to save data but it is for sure the coolest ;)
On our latest GBC 53 Marble Music Machine you need to program the songs by hand using the black LEGO Technic pins. You can create any song you want.
What song would like to make?