Q-BA-MAZE

Marble Run Sculpture: DINO ONE

At the close of the March 2008 interview with John Baichtal of Wired.com's GeekDad Blog, I said we were working on a brontosaurus, and now:

Here is DINO ONE!

DINO ONE is our first dinosaur design and we are about to follow this up with ROBOT ONE and BUTTERFLY ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR. You can find instruction plans for DINO ONE on our ever-growing plans page on the Q-BA-MAZE website. The plans page includes Q-BA-MAZE designs you can build using anywhere from 12 to more than 100 cubes.

Fish Sculpture at the Walker Art Center

A group of students, architects and sculptors got together recently to plan this Q-BA-MAZE installation at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Over the course of an intense weekend of activity, the vague idea of making a fish resulted in this giant fish at the head of a growing school of smaller Q-BA-MAZE fish. (Construction plans for some of these fish are available on the plans page of the Q-BA-MAZE website).

Here is a night shot of the fish. It is tucked under this cantilevered ceiling of a recent addition to the Walker by architects Herzog and DeMeuron. (Notice the size of the fish compared to the guy doing calisthenics outside!)

Matt Peiken created this video blog for the Walker.

We had 10,000 cubes on hand for the installation and around 5,000 ended up in the big fish. Each of the vertical stripes of color in the fish is a separate section. This division made it easier to break the project into separate tasks. On our main installation evening, seven people arrived and worked on the fish simultaneously.

The curve of the fish is made by having each section slightly rotated with respect to its neighboring sections. The tail and fins are all just a single cube wide and held together just with the Q-BA-MAZE joinery. There is no glue in this construction. It is composed solely of the three types of Q-BA-MAZE cubes.

Design Thinking with Cubes, Components, and Constructions

The photo above shows the design called Q50/plan01 disassembled into several components. The components are made from two or more cubes, and these components can be rearranged into new constructions.

If you take a close look at the plan that comes with each 50-pack or at this plan from the Q-BA-MAZE website, you can see which cubes make each of the components shown in the top photo:

• Cubes 1-7 are the "base" (front middle in the photo)*
• Cubes 8-11 are a "4-cube scrambler" (back row, far right in photo)
• Cubes 12-22 are a "9-cube scrambler" with a "2-cube switch back" on top (back row, second from right in photo)
• Cubes 23-34 are a "double helix" (back row, third from right in photo)
• Cubes 35-36 are a "2-cube column" (back row, far left in photo)

* This "base" composed of cubes 1-7 is good stable starting point for any new construction.

The photo below shows Q50/plan01 on the left and a completely new construction on the right made from the same components just rearranged in a new order. Working with components like this is a faster way to design and build new constructions compared with building one cube at a time. An understanding of components will also assist your design thinking as you imagine your own new constructions.

Have fun inventing and building with Q-BA-MAZE!

A 20-Pack Design with Three Jumps

This is my new favorite construction with the 20-pack. The features I like are:

• The base is just one bottom-exit cube.
• There are jumps out of each of the three double-exit cubes.
• An upper part of the structure appears to float (the weight of the construction does not come straight down through a column, but is diverted in a mini-spiral).

If you would like to build this construction:

• You can try just copying this construction by looking at the photo.
• You can follow this plan (which comes in pdf format).
• You can follow this Excel plan (see the post on Q-BA-CAD to learn more about using Microsoft Excel as "CAD" software for drawing, saving, and emailing your Q-BA-MAZE designs).

(If you make this one, remember the trick to get the balls out: just slide the construction to the edge of the table with one hand and catch the balls in your other hand.)

Cantilevers, Counter-balance, Components and other Craziness

This photo shows a blue "straight-away" component cantilevering to the left, while a green "straight-away" component counter-balances the structure by cantilevering back to the right.

In this post, I illustrate a number of different "components" that can be built into a complete construction. I use the base configuration from Q20/plan03 (cubes 1-6) and then 4 blue single-exit cubes and 4 green single-exit cubes to create the various components.

This is a six-cube "zig-zag" component. Each green cube makes a right-turn and each blue cube makes a left-turn. The left-right-left pattern makes the zig-zag. An eight-cube "zig-zag" would have required further cubes on the opposite side as a counter-balance.

This is an eight-cube "switch-back" component. Each single exit-cube aims the pathway back under the previous single-exit cube. The result is very stable tower form that is just one cube wide and two-cubes deep.

This is an eight-cube "switch-back helix" component. The blue single-exit cubes each rotate 90 degrees with respect to the blue cube above. The green single-exit cubes aim the pathway back under the previous blue single-exit cube. The result is what appears to be a central blue column wrapped with a sporadic green helix.

This is an eight-cube "1x3 switch-back" component. The component is one cube wide and three cubes deep. The pathway goes straight through two cubes and then the third cube bends the path back under the previous two cubes. The set of four green cubes could be rotated 90 degrees with respect to the blue cubes and then you'd have a "rotating 1x3 switch-back".

This is a six-cube "straight-away" component. The two cubes on the left are necessary to counter-balance the weight of the "straight-away" as it leans far out to the right. It is not necessary for a structure to be symmetrical to have balance. There just needs to be enough weight to keep things from tipping. As you get more daring with your own designs, you'll have to experiment with trial and error. If your structure falls down, you probably went beyond some physical limit. Pushing these limits is part of the fun!

This is an eight-cube "helix" component. More specifically, this is a "2x2 counter-clockwise single-helix." Each cube turns the pathway to the left as it goes down, so the pathway spins counter-clockwise. If each cube turned the path to the right, it would be a clockwise helix. Looking at this helix from above, it fits on a 2x2 cube grid.

This is an eight-cube "2x2 counter-clockwise double-helix" component. It is much like the single-helix, but a second helix fills in the empty cantilevered spaces of the first helix. Here, one helix is green and the other is blue. DNA is a double-helix. Question: Is the DNA double-helix clockwise or counter-clockwise? and why?

This is an eight-cube "3x3 counter-clockwise double-helix." The two helixes will never touch. Double-exit cubes can be used occasionally as a "3x3 double-helix" is built as a means of connecting and stabilizing the two pathways. Cube #34 in Q50/plan01 is a double-exit cube used in this way.

This is an eight-cube "3x3 counter-clockwise single-helix."

The list of components goes on and on. Take a look at the post on 10 Billion Trillion Combinations and you will get an idea of just how many configurations are possible.

Have fun experimenting and exploring and finding the coolest components for your crazy constructions!