You weren't kidding when you said that ball trail was big!. I figured it was about 3' tall from the yesterday's picture. That looks to be 15' or 20' tall! Wow! Very cool! I want one for Christmas! Thanks for all the great pics! Wish I could be there with yall.

Actually they are pool balls. Sadly, all the balls were laying on the bottom even though the elevator was running. Obviously a leak of some sort. It looks like the way the elevator was made, it's designed to have several (maybe 8) balls going at the same time. It's painted well too. All welded metal rods.

Roger

That's odd that the balls were all at the bottom because it looked like they made that RBS with 4 rails throughout the sculpture instead of 2. 2 rails is of course more elegant than 4 but 4 pretty much ensures that no balls fall off. Yep, perhaps there was some track breakage somewhere.

In Canberra (the Australian capital) in the Kids science museum (Questacon), they have something similar called the Gravitram, which is 8-10 feet tall. You can't see too much detail, but you can get a brief description by visiting their site (www.questacon.com.au) and selecting the virtual tour, then after you enter the building, pan to the left and it's there. The limited view doesn't do it justice though.

After a brief google there's more info from the guy who made it on: http://www.gravitram.com/kinetic_sculpture.htm

Cheers, Marcin.

That last Gravitram on that website is the one in Dallas that I think Steve was trying to talk them into letting me fix it since it was broken for a time.

Those things are incredibly cool, and that giant thing that Steve photographed would be a wonder to see.

When we saw it the previous night, most of the balls were zooming around like they were supposed to. We noticed two balls on the bottom. There are several points where balls jump over things or get launched through the air, so they probably miss once in a while.