Wooden wonder: Mark Wardle with The Marble Steps.
By Noel Murphy
WHAT HAPPENS in the shed usually stays in the shed but occasionally something surprising emerges from that male bastion.
Geelong West’s Mark Wardle has fashioned a power of wooden off-cuts into what looks like a better mousetrap.
As in Mousetrap the game.
In fact, his highly sophisticated contraption rattles, clunks, spins and turns like nothing seen before.
The Marble Steps, as Wardle has dubbed his sculpture cum folly, is proof positive of what can be achieved with little more tools than a bandsaw, a disc sander and ingenuity.
“It started out as a toy when the kids were little but then grew into something of an obsession,” Mr Wardle laughed.
“It’s got about 50 species of timber all from scraps – chipboard, ply, merbau, Huon pine, hardwood, cherry, bits of mahogany, whatever I could find.”
The metre-cube-sized wooden structure is jamb-packed with dowel, spindles, channels, spirals, switches, even wobbling birds reminiscent of Mr Wardle’s childhood toys.
Marbles negotiating Escher-inspired tracks somehow manage to not just click and clunk but hum, buzz and even assume melodic tones as they bounce across xylophonic timbers.
Mr Wardle said he exhibited The Marble Steps from time to time but it was now gathering more dust and insects than he cared to think about.
And with summer looming he was unlikely to make it public again for a while because humidity and heat can play havoc with its precision machinations.
The contraption catch, however, be seen in action on YouTube by keying The Marble Steps.
