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Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Q: How does a barrel work, and how many barrels go into it at one time?
A barrel machine is basically a pump. It uses 14 bars on the side of the model. Each time a barrel is drawn, it adds one barrel to the bottom of the stack and one falls to the top. The system has 20 barrels so there can be 6 barrels rolling at the same time.
Q: Do the barrels go all the way down? Do they fall off the set, and have to be put back into the slot, or does the machine bring them back up?
The barrels roll from top to bottom where they are collected in a hopper that is connected to the barrel pump. This creates an infinite barrel which is, by definition, “barrels of pleasure”.
Q: What was the biggest obstacle in developing and testing the machine?
The biggest challenge was getting the barrels to roll smoothly without stopping or sticking. This was achieved by combining stairs, LEGOs, slides, arches and using LEGO Technic blocks which are slightly thinner than LEGO bricks. This allowed us to capture the feeling of the play as the barrel slowly descends. I rolled thousands of barrels down the road to find out… Those barrels drove me bananas!
The second major obstacle was finding a way to get the barrel from the bottom to the top again. We built all kinds of things; single-barrel bottom-to-top firing devices, worm gears, pressure multipliers, and more. But it turned out the correct answer was just a lot of barrels.
Q: How does the joystick and button make Jumpman/Mario move?
The joystick moves the Jumpman from left to right using a long lever on the back of the model, connected to a joystick. The skip button uses the same mechanism used on the piano key. When pressed in front of the model, the other side of the see-saw lever presses against the long stick with the Jumpman on top. When the button is released gravity returns the Jumpman to the ground.
