Time Collector

A 24-inch tall kinetic marble clock — part sculpture, part functioning clock. A wheel of marbles rotates through a gear train, with each marble eventually depositing into a collector at the base, marking the passage of time visually rather than with hands or numbers.

The project moved through distinct phases: heavy early sketching and ideation, force and load analysis with free body diagrams of the marble wheel system, three rounds of prototyping to validate the mechanism — starting with cardboard, then two rounds of 3D-printed iterations — then scaling up to the full-sized final design. We also ran finite element analysis comparing the old vs. new backboard design to make sure the structure could handle the load.