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 ;)
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Check out their website for even more hobbies (Dutch only)
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
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
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?
Build our GBCs from completely different LEGO set!
Szilard Gyalay (United States) build our GBC 31 Flex Conveyor without owning the required LEGO 42094 set. This alternate model uses a lot of standard parts (like most LEGO sets) and by using only parts from his own LEGO collection he could easily recreate it. This explains the color differences but the functions are 100% identical to our model.
Szilard quote: “It just shows yet again that no set is need, using the instructions and some imagination things become real.”
We could not have said it any better. Thanks for your sharing your video and your creativity! Keep up the great work.
Have you build one of our first GBCs when we first started 8 years ago? GBC 10 Funfair – a LEGO 42042 Alternate Model for the Blue Crane. Internal we speak of the one who started it all and who could have imagined what after all those years this has turned into. Still love playing and thinkering with LEGO to get the max potential out of every LEGO set.
Can you still remember your first GBC model? Was it your own design or from our building instructions?
