Review on ROBOTIME Puzzles Adults Wooden Marble by Mark Hicks

I've loved marble cars since I was a kid building marble ramps out of Fisher Price building blocks. That's how I came up with this Robotime 3D puzzle. It's actually not a puzzle because there are instructions on how to build it. Anyway, I spent 4 hours building it last night. First you get a bundle of laser cut plywood sheets in the box. Hundreds of special parts have to be pushed out of the sheet metal during assembly. They are very accurate given that everything was designed and tested on a computer before anything was built. Along with the wood pieces are some plastic cut outs, a couple of axles of different lengths, plastic lock washers and small screws. The instructions are pretty clear. A couple of times they could have been clearer but rarely got to the point where I had to rack my brains a lot so the whole build went pretty smoothly. I really liked the assembly order. Some attention has been paid to the satisfaction factor in crafting this thing. You start off with some of the more tedious tasks by creating various ramps and such that will be used later. Then they let you build the gear box and then you start building the base and finally add all the sections you built at the beginning. This is the last step which is really satisfying and wouldn't work so well if the tedious things weren't done at the beginning. Someone thought about it, and it says something. There are some disappointments here and there. Some parts are very tight, and since you're using thin pieces of wood, too much force can cause the parts to break. This becomes an issue when fit is critical to getting the balls through the section. If you don't insert the part all the way, the balls will get stuck. That leads to some stress. I didn't break much when creating this, but a few things I broke are things that are clearly defined that people will break. How do I know? Because all the parts I broke were included in an extra parts sheet, presumably just because of that. One thing I ended up doing was using wood glue in some places where it was obvious they were going to be difficult to stay in place. This included a key ramp on the gears and multiple ramps that ran into each other on the other side. If I had to do it all over again I would use glue on a few other parts, although I only know that in hindsight. There are also a few spots where the balls get stuck. I'm not sure if that's my design flaw. I had to fiddle with a few things and heavily modify the clear plastic strip on one side to make things run smoother. Luckily they include a small sheet of sandpaper and a few extra lock washers to help. The end result is pretty cool. It has a crank that uses large gears to move the balls to the top of the machine where they roll into different channels. There are different methods the device uses to deflect balls in different ways and the end product is fun to watch and play with. It also looks pretty cool on the display. At the time of writing, it costs just under $60. Is it worth? If you like working with your hands and like mechanical things that do cool things and look cool after you put them together... then yes. I really enjoyed building and playing with it.