Chain reaction artist Kaplamino used rubber bands to add fun surprises to his latest tilted table marble video. Read the rest

YouTuber Kaplamino makes ingenious chain reaction tricks with marbles and dominoes. His latest, Blue Marble 2, is loaded with delightful little mechanisms that release their stored energy when a marble comes into contact with them.

From Kaplamino's comments:

The air canon with the balloon was a big challenge to make. The rubber band squeezes the balloon around the straw to release the air in a specific direction. Then the hardest part was to find how to stop the air and deliver it when I want. It was too difficult to put something like tape at the end of the straw because it was either too clingy or not enough.

The solution was to twist the balloon around the straw and block it in this position with a rope. In this position the air stays in the balloon until it untwists. I explain it because I think what exactly happened it's not easy to get when you see the video.

Kaplamino's "The Blue Marble" is made from ordinary items like rubber bands, magnets, blocks of wood, pencils, bottle caps, and plastic forks, but he turns it into an almost magical chain reaction machine on a tilted wood plane.

After 3 months of work and probably more than 500 fails, I'm happy to present you my best video ever. Since magnets and marbles I've always wanted to make a big chain reaction in one take with this 2D style !

It's also a "one marble path" which means you have to follow the same marble for all the tricks (in that case the little blue one.) Because everything is in a tilted plane, the hard part was to find different ways of having the marble riding up along the table (magnets, falling weight, catapult ...). To do that, the marble has to be light. And because everything has to be triggered by this little marble, all the tricks are very unstable. Most fails happened when an element fall down earlier than expected.

I learned a lot about chain reaction, and I discovered the amazing power of the hot glue gun!

This cute little video takes place in a Gumby-style universe and stars a little red ball named Biisuke who must go through a clever Rube Goldberg obstacle course to save his brothers who are imprisoned in a tower. Read the rest