Saving the Marble Funnels with Rubber Coating? - Marble Machine X Episode 129

[funnel sound test]

Hannes: - What has been going on
in the beautiful world of the MMX this week?

Martin: - Yeah, it was really time to try to do something about

the sound of the marble funnels.

When we designed these marble funnels
it was just like trying to make them

look as cool as possible, you know, and
on the Marble Machine a special design requirement

is to leave a lot of air and space.

I wanted a kind of transparent funnel,
but all transparent materials are like

plastic and I knew I didn't want a
plastic funnel so we ended up with this

steel cage, the stainless steel cage,
and I was like over the moon happy about

the looks and the function and everything,
but the big problem was the sound.

And the team members kept asking me:
"Is it not going to be a problem with the sound?"

And I was like "No, signal-to-noise, we
just choose the right microphone".

That is kind of a very naive
way of doing things.

This naivety has now caught up with me
and the sound of the stainless steel funnels

is actually a real problem.

So here you can hear a test I made with the hi-hat.

I recorded this with a very strange microphone, so it sounds bad

but you can hear clearly that the sound of the marble funnels

is actually equally strong as the sound of the hi-hat.

[loud metallic sound]

As I explained, you can fix this by
putting contact microphone on the hi-hat

or putting a microphone much closer to
the hi-hat away from the funnels and

stuff like that but I wanted to try to fix this problem

at the source by actually reducing the
sound of the funnels themselves.

When I told about this problem we were swamped by the idea

to dip the funnels in plastidip.

I didn't have plastidip but Alex
ordered me these products that is like plastidip,

so it was time to take the funnels off the machine

and start to coat them with this

transparent rubber coating for automotive industries.

Today I've been making a lot of coatings
and I'm not really happy yet, but this is the funnels

and I want to put some more coatings
and I can really already feel

that the metal sound is gone.

Hannes: - Oh wow!
Martin: - It's more of a duller sound.

So right now I'm going to head over on
the Marble Machine and try this on the machine.

So the feel of this funnel is completely
different

and the rubber looks great; it just created a gloss.

So I attached it here...

[less metallic thump]

Well...

[another thump]

Oh, it's so much better; it isn't perfect
but it's so much better.

[another thump]

Wow, did you hear that?

[another thump]

I think I can increase the layer
thickness to reduce the sound further.

Maybe use a real plastidip product where I'm actually dipping the funnels rather than spraying.

Let's now add this that hasn't had a treatment.

[metallic sound]

[metallic sound]

And go back to the treated one.

[softer sound]

Wow, did you hear that,
when I was holding here?

[softer sound]

Holding there

- Are you happy with it?

- I'm really really happy.

If, as you can see in the before and after,
we made a big difference

and it just looks actually better,
so, yeah, it's a big success actually.

I'm really happy this was a really
annoying thing.

You know what Tim Keller told me the other day?

- What?

- He said that the Marble Machine X is not sunken cost fallacy.

I was so happy to hear.

- Okay, he's a good liar, though.

[laughter]

Martin: - You say goodbye to the audience, Hannes.

- See you later.
This was the final episode of Wintergatan Wednesdays.

I think we ended on a high note.

Well, Martin, surely the funnels weren't the only thing you worked on this week.

After renovating the music studio I'm back as project manager for the Marble Machine X project.

I'm working on these yellow tasks of populating the task list

and the task list looks like this; and we
have quite a lot of fun things going on.

Lucas is working on a lifting solution

which we're gonna put some bolts in the legs of the Marble Machine

to make it easy for me to move it around when recording video;

Richard is working on these cyber capos.

Here's the inbound ramps, was a discord suggestion,

they're gonna make it silent when the marbles go into the plywood gear here.

When I'm looking at the issues list I've been
color coding things,

so the yellow is the ongoing tasks,
the green is the finished tasks,

all these green ones over here is me
fixing the music studio.

The blue issues is everything that's going to be solved with the marble divider redesign.

I have realized that I almost delegated
everything that I can delegate right now

so that's quite an achievement for the PM butterfly
and now I need to design some stuff in CAD

before I can delegate it too for manufacturing.

So today I'm gonna do exactly that with this pink task here; issue number 60: conveyor belt intro.

Let's head over to Fusion 360 and look at the old design.

As you can see there's a lot of parts
and when I tried this design on the machine

I realized this is way over complicated.

We don't need to constrain the marbles
as hard as I thought; that just causes issues.

We can just basically make an open tray for the conveyor belt to pick up marbles in

I can delete all this but I don't want
to redesign this from scratch,

I'm just going to basically butcher the
old design.

You can see the little triangle I get there?
It's because I'm in the middle of the line.

So I'm just going to add a little here...

Let's add 40 millimeters...
See, I'm locking onto the line there

that means the spline is tangential with the side

so I'm happy with that shape and then I can

just cut and take mirror and I'm gonna

choose this line and this line,
I'm gonna de-choose this line

and then I'm gonna choose this line as a middle line

and there you see it's mirroring on the other side,
so now we have a symmetric shape.

I have an 18 millimeter opening of the PMMA pipe.

I want this opening of the PMMA pipe

to be tangential with the level of the floor
like that.

Boom! And then if I make a 22
millimeter, which is outer diameter,

and I x-ed that so it's
not a construction line anymore.

If I then show the body I can then make
an extrusion

and then we have a cut-out for
the pipe so, minus 20 millimeters,

that's the entry of the pipe.

This whole thing is hurting my CAD pride now.

I'm gonna start over next to it...

"New component"- yes, I'm gonna throw you away,

"Size of a marble" - 15.875...
Boom!

This, the thickness of the acrylic, 15.

So cute they are, the marbles they are
waiting to be picked up by the conveyor belt!

And I want this angle to be...
eight degrees. Boom!

And I want this little detent to be a little bit longer,

and I can go back to my plane

and do it five degrees instead.

Did you see how that little detent became longer

because I'm, like, reducing
the angle of the plane?

So now again I can cut the opening for
the PMMA pipe

and now we're gonna make a top side of
this.

We don't need six screws, Martin.

That's typical Martin-2019 idea.

Four screws is enough and the acrylic
stock is 15, so we take this 15

millimeter straight up,
so I actually cut a little bit here

on the underside so we could
clamp with the screws on this PMMA pipe.

You will see the PMMA pipe from the top;
it's actually pretty cool.

Here you can clearly see the cutout I made for the clamping.

I think that feature is really nice in
this design.

Are you ready for the final comparison?

This is Martin Molin à la 2019.

This is Martin à la 2020.
No complicated top side

and we're not like trying to constrain the marbles
more than they need to be constrained.

I've noticed that the marbles are behaving great

if they're just free in a tray the conveyor belt is picking them up.

This part broke when the conveyor belt broke.

So now I'm just gonna upload this step file into dropbox,

put the dropbox link in a project chapter,

send it off to the octopus
and in a couple of weeks this part will

arrive to me manufactured,
hopefully, and it will work. Yeah!

And I put it on Discord and Alex CNC
accepted the task.

Alex CNC has made all the acrylic parts with flame polishing and stuff, so

I was very happy.

Hannes: - And speaking about the
e-team:

I've been talking to Christof, a new face in the team.

What are you currently working on,
on the machine itself?

Christof: - Mainly I'm responsible for the sound wiring,

which is the pure wiring.
So I'm not picking a microphone,

(that's easier if you're close to the machine, that's Martin),

but getting all the microphones that are
already on the machine

(and that are coming to the machine)
ready and wired in a neat manner

so no cables hanging into
gears that are moving

and no cables being
ripped off or

melted while somebody is welding.

Exactly how the cables are routed

will come a little later and it's not
important right now.

So, we're making a sound central (how
Martin calls it)

in the back of the MMX, that everything
will be connected to.

But how we keep the
cables out of moving gear is a decision

that we much easier can make on the machine,

so we wait with that
until we can all meet in France and decide that.

One of my different projects is a holder

for microphones under the vibraphone.

It has to be flexible
because we don't know exactly how the

vibraphone resonator pipes are going to
look in the end.

They might be open or closed, short or
long, bent or straight,

that is still very much
up for debate.

And one of those flexible solutions is
spanning a net

close to the resonator pipes and just
hanging

several microphones in that net.

So I built a frame,

and what I used is a carbon fiber pipe
and rubber connectors that you can

easily buy off the shelf (that are
normally used for kites).

And because they're rubber,
you can just slide things along to

stretch the net a little more or less
and then you have...

exactly the type of net you want.

The double layer net... gives us the
opportunity

to angle a mic in a certain way by just
using different holes in the

top and the bottom net.

So the hope is that this net is dampening enough
so that all the noise that is inside the

frame of the MMX will not transfer to the microphones,

and they will only catch
sound that's in the air, not in the frame.

Martin: - Ding ding-a-ding-a-ding!
Oh, the mail just arrived with Christof's package.

Hannes: - Oh my god, how exciting! Live!

- Whoa! Check this out!
- Wow, paper!

- Wow, these are so cool.
Carbon fiber sticks,

oh, beautiful elastics.
I've never seen so cool elastics.

I think with this I can build any frame
I want and...

I love all the pieces you sent Christof!
So awesome!

Thanks for being part of the MMX
e-team and deliver so cool stuff.

- Christof delivers.
- Christof delivers big time.

Thank you Christof, awesome!

Speaking about people who delivers big time:

[singing simply to rhythmic chimes]
♪ C-o-m-m-u-n-i-t-y C-o-r-n-e-r ♪

♪ Community Corner ♪

- Wow!

[thumping bass beat]

[compressed voice over added]
"There's something new under heaven."

"Something that has never been there before."

"Ladies and gentlemen,
we are bringing you..."

"...the most important story of this century."

Martin: - Yeah!

Wow!

[music fades]

What? It's fantastic!
Why is the water purple in the end?

And Benton Collins Photography
may... is maybe aware of

that ice is my favorite thing,
that I drink everything with ice.

- It's so cool!
I only have one big critique on that video:

Where was my name in the stars?

- What? He used the list in youtube
about contributing and you didn't help

at all with the Marble Machine X design, Hannes.

- Oh, sorry! Okay yeah, well that's true.
[laughter] It's on me.

- You were just there, like drying up my tears

when I wanted to stop with the
*first* machine

and you have been there ever since.

But apparently Benton Collins doesn't care about that.
- No, he doesn't care about me.

- Fantastic editing and I love the...
- The floating angle grinder!

- Thank you Benton,
really, really awesome!

[fast glockenspiel melody,
accompanied by mechanical noise]
[♪ J S Bach: Bouree in E-minor BWV 996 ♪]

[another melody]

WOW! Okay, this is fantastic!

And you know what?

If you just put some more dampening
material in the box

you have like a perfect sound
where the marbles are falling.

Look at me, like teaching other people
how to stop the marbles from sounding,

while I'm like failing exactly with that thing
in the same video.

Przemek Pytel, I am really impressed by what you did here.

I think I never heard a Marble Machine
being able to play so fast and so good

and I think you just absolutely
pull this one off.

Thomas: - Hi Hannes and Martin.

The little sister of the MMX:

The brain, arduino nano with power transistors and keyboard.

The mechanical control unit for the marbles
and the solenoids.

The marble divider...

- Cool!

Wow.

- and the glockenspiel.
[plays short melody]

- Wow! Thomas, thank you so much for showing this, this is awesome!

The whole design of this machine,
Thomas, is like how I wished

I had designed my machine
if I designed it

completely in CAD from the beginning.

Everything looks so clean and things just working...

Wow Thomas, that was really impressive

and I just searched for Exergia and I
found his youtube channel

and Thomas has like
invented a candle car kit, thermal generator...

There is so much cool stuff. Kurbel Generator...

So this candle car looks amazing,

like a car that
burns on a candle, I guess,

so check out Exergia's youtube channel.

Awesome Thomas, thank you so much for sending it in.

[speaking Spanish]
"Por todos las chicas y chicos de España."

"Tenemos un youtube channel,
se llama Wintergatan ESP."

"Estudio guitarra flamenca, en el sur de España en la ciudad de Sevilla."

"Hablar un poquito, comprendire nada."

"Pero mon amigo Carlos ..."
He is a very nice guy and he is translating

all our Wintergatan videos into Spanish
on the Wintergatan ESP youtube channel.

If you know anyone from Latin America or Spain

who you think
might be interested in becoming part of

the Wintergatan community,
please tell them about

the Wintergatan ESP youtube channel

because the algorithm is
not really finding it yet.

So if you could tell them about that, it would be

a great help for the Wintergatan youtube channel.

And I actually did study flamenco guitar in Sevilla in the south of Spain.

It was... I was a disaster as flamenco student
but I picked up a little bit of Spanish,

but Carlos is doing it really well.

Thanks, to Carlos Montoro from Anjuda Guitars,

for making all the translations for the Wintergatan ESP
Spanish youtube channel.

Check it out!

- Well that was all the lovely bits and
pieces for this week's episode.

We just want to thank you all for watching

and following along on the process.

And you know, we see you next week

on the next Wintergatan Wednesdays.

Take care everybody.
Bye!

- Boom!