How a $3 Spacewarp Changed My Life | Rolling Ball Sculpture
I can trace my career building rolling ball sculptures back through a pretty clear series of events, and the whole thing starts with a $3 toy my brother Larry found at a thrift store. I was about 21 years old. Larry was volunteering at a local thrift shop when someone donated an unopened Spacewarp Black Wolf building set, still new in the box. Apparently, whoever originally received it had decided it wasn't for them and never even put it together. Larry saw it and thought, Matthew would love this. He was right.
From Spacewarp to Rolling Ball Sculpture
I had never seen a Spacewarp before. I didn't even know something like it existed. It was basically a build-it-yourself roller coaster for steel balls, with flexible plastic rails, supports, loops and a motorized spiral lift that continuously carried the balls back to the top. I thought it was the most awesome thing I had ever seen.
I put the entire thing together in a day. I mostly followed the design in the instructions at first, but once it was running, I started changing things here and there to suit myself. That was one of the things I immediately loved about it. The track could be adjusted and manipulated, and little changes affected how the ball behaved. The helical lift especially fascinated me. The rotating spiral picked up the balls at the bottom, carried them back to the top and released them onto the track again. Once everything was adjusted correctly, the machine just ran and ran. I could watch it for a very long time.
It wasn't perfect, though, and strangely enough, that may have been part of what hooked me. The plastic track would move slightly or something would get out of adjustment, and I'd have to figure out why the ball wasn't behaving exactly the way it should. Instead of finding that frustrating, I loved it. I became the machine's keeper, constantly making tiny adjustments and trying to get the whole thing to run perfectly. Larry got to see it completed, and we enjoyed watching it together. At the time, of course, neither of us had any idea where this $3 thrift-store toy would lead me.
Eventually life moved on and the Spacewarp went into a closet. About four years later, when I was around 25, I pulled it back out. One section of track had always been troublesome, and I decided to see if I could find some replacement parts for it. This was the late 1990s, when finding something obscure online wasn't quite as simple as typing a few words into Google. While searching the internet for Spacewarp parts, I stumbled across a website that had collected photographs, information and examples of rolling ball sculptures made by different artists.
That website changed everything.
I discovered the work of Jeffrey Zachmann, George Rhoads, Larry Lawrence and other people who were making their own rolling ball sculptures. There were also one-off machines by people whose names I've long since forgotten. I couldn't find enough information. Every new sculpture showed me another possibility. Until then, Spacewarp was simply this fascinating manufactured toy I'd discovered. Suddenly I was looking at people who were building their own versions from scratch.
And I had a very simple thought: Why am I messing around with this premade toy? I can make my own.
Learning to Build My Own
I didn't immediately quit everything and become a sculptor. I had a job and a life, and making these things had to fit around both. But within a few months I had built a wooden workbench and somehow stuffed it into the living room of my apartment. Then I started experimenting.
My first rolling ball sculptures were made from copper-coated steel brazing rod that I soldered together. I called some of those early experiments my "Carnival" pieces because all the thin supports and tracks reminded me of wooden roller coasters. They were terrible. They worked, which at the time was the important part, but they looked like a ball of wire and metal. There was supporting structure everywhere, the tracks were thin, and after a while the soldered joints would rust where the copper coating had been burned away. Eventually I threw them all out.
Next, I tried brass. That was a considerable improvement. It didn't have the rust problem, and I could make much cleaner-looking sculptures, but soldered brass created a different problem. The joints weren't particularly strong, and the finished sculptures were delicate. I was also using 5/8-inch marbles at the time. They were small and finicky, and I didn't have the track clamps and fixtures I've developed over the years, so getting two rails positioned exactly where I wanted them was an exercise in patience. But I kept building.
My parents eventually moved into a new home, and I decided to make them a wall-mounted rolling ball sculpture. They hadn't commissioned it. I simply thought one of my pieces would look good on their new wall and made it for them as a gift. Unexpectedly, they gave me $500 for it, and I immediately used the money to buy a MIG welder.
I had done a little welding in high school and some while working with my uncle, Clif, in his shop in Sunnyvale, but I didn't have much experience. Like almost everything else about building rolling ball sculptures, I learned as I went. The welder opened up stainless steel as a practical material for me. At the time I could only find stainless filler rod in three-foot lengths, which made everything more difficult than it needed to be, but welding solved one of the problems I'd been fighting from the beginning: the structure stayed where I put it.
That was something Spacewarp itself had inadvertently taught me. The plastic track on the toy always needed a little attention because it could shift over time. With welded metal, once I figured out exactly where a track needed to be, I could make it stay there.
My earliest homemade sculptures also didn't have powered ball lifts. I simply picked up the marbles at the bottom and put them back at the top. That was manageable on a small desktop sculpture, but on a larger piece it became ridiculous. More importantly, while everyone else could stand back and enjoy watching the sculpture, I was concentrating on collecting marbles and putting them back at the top. I wanted the machine to take care of itself.
Spacewarp had already shown me the answer years earlier with its helical lift. Eventually I began incorporating powered lifts into my own work so the balls could continuously return to the top and the sculpture could run on its own. Spacewarp influenced other elements of my work as well. Its horizontal Y-shaped track splitters, loop-d-loops and helical lift all became ideas I would explore and develop in my own way as my sculptures became more complicated.
From Hobby to Career
Around 2000, I began making small desktop rolling ball sculptures and listing them on eBay. They were still made from brass and soldered together, and they were manually operated, but they were small enough to ship and I wanted to see if anybody was interested.
They sold. In fact, they sold surprisingly well. Several attracted bidding wars toward the end of the auction. That was another major moment for me. Up until then I was making these things because I couldn't stop making them. Now complete strangers were willing to pay me for them. Maybe this could become something more than a hobby.
I registered RollingBallSculpture.com and, armed with some very limited HTML skills, started building my own website. Every time I finished another sculpture, I added it to the site. And it worked. People began finding me and asking if I could build something specifically for them. One commission led to another, the sculptures became larger and more complicated, and my fabrication skills continued to improve.
The real turning point came when the Korean Rolling Ball Museum, Funique, found my website and commissioned eight sculptures from me at once. It was a large enough order, and would take several months to complete, that I could finally quit my roofing job and build rolling ball sculptures full time. I remember telling my boss, Wes - who is still a very close friend of mine - that I was quitting to make rolling ball sculptures for a living. I think he was about as surprised as I was that this strange hobby had actually reached that point. While I was working through the eight sculptures for Funique, more commissions continued to come in. By the time the Korean order was finished, I didn't need to go back to another full-time job. I still took other jobs and side work when I needed to, but rolling ball sculpture had become my main source of income - and it stayed that way for roughly the next 20 years.
Looking back, it's interesting to see how much of Spacewarp is still present in what I build. There are obvious mechanical connections - the helical lift, track splitters, loops and continuously circulating balls. But I think the more important connection is the fascination with making a complicated mechanical system work just right. That first Spacewarp sometimes needed attention. A track would shift or a ball wouldn't behave correctly, and I'd have to find the problem and make some tiny adjustment. I loved that part as much as watching the finished machine. More than 25 years later, I'm still doing essentially the same thing. The materials are different, the machines are considerably larger and I've gotten a little better at it, but I'm still watching a ball closely, figuring out why it didn't do exactly what I wanted and making a tiny adjustment until it does.
Looking Back at a $3 Toy
I own another Spacewarp today. It's still sitting unassembled in its box. Somehow, I've never found the time to put it together, but I like having it. Even seeing the box makes me smile.
Larry passed away in 1997, before any of my experiments with rolling ball sculpture began. I'm grateful that he got to see that original Black Wolf assembled and running, and that we were able to enjoy it together. What he never got to see was what happened because of it.
That $3 thrift-store gift eventually became the focal point of my working life. It gave me an outlet for my constant need to build things and make things move. It led to a career that allowed me to support my family, work with people all over the world and make things that other people can enjoy. I don't know what direction my life would have taken if Larry hadn't been volunteering at that thrift store when an unopened Spacewarp happened to come through the door.
I just know I'm glad he looked at it and thought I'd like it.
He was right.
