This is one of the most striking Rolling Ball Sculptures I’ve ever built. Most of my work has been square or rectangular, so building an RBS inside a huge round globe was something completely different.

The Globe was commissioned for a tricentennial celebration in San Antonio, Texas. The frame is about 4 feet in diameter and the entire sculpture stands just over 6 feet tall. A helical lift runs straight up the center with three columns of marbles and three different release points. From there, the balls can take eight different paths, so there’s always something happening somewhere on the sculpture.

There are several ball-collecting tipping arms, zig-zags, spirals, wavy track, long sections of curving track and some complicated “pretzel” loop d’ loops. And because the sculpture is round, the entire globe can be rotated. There really isn’t a front or back—you can turn it around and see a completely different collection of tracks and elements.

One of my favorite mechanisms is what I call the Ferris wheel lift. Balls coming down the main tracks collect together and their weight rotates a large wheel. That wheel lifts another ball onto its own closed-loop track. The ball makes its trip around and returns to wait for the next group of balls to collect enough weight to rotate the wheel again. It’s basically a little gravity-powered RBS running inside the larger RBS.

I delivered this sculpture to Texas myself. It was a great trip and my first chance to see quite a bit of the U.S. during the drive there and back.

Handmade in the USA from 100% stainless steel, TIG welded.