Wesley's Tool-Box

Balls running around elaborate loops of rails in museums are quite a sight to see. So why not bring it home? Hence the SpaceRail steel ball roller coaster kit, which is a knock-off of Spacewarp. I got the Level 2 one from a community-driven discount purchase at a price of about US$23. The box said this was a beginner-level kit that's supposed to take up to 2 hours to build. That was rather optimistic, as it turned out.

Read on for the photos of the build process.

The box contains the plastic tubes and parts, the metal balls and rods, a platform, an elevator motor, and an instruction manual. The parts are very small, so be careful if you have little kids. The instruction manual is primarily written in Chinese, with English translation. The translation quality ranges from passable to terrible, so you'll have to guess from the diagrams.


Setting up the elevator and the platform is by far the easiest part. Parts are big and easy to put together, so Celine was able to give a hand in building them.


Creating the arms and seesaws are slightly more complicated, but not really difficult. It's just repetitive.


The assembled parts are inserted into the metal rods, which are then set up on the platform. All that's left to do is put in the rails properly. The time it took up to this point was almost two hours, though, because I wanted to get the kids involved in the process.


And it's pretty difficult to do. It's not snapping in the rail itself that's the problem, but that you need to tweak them carefully so that the balls roll all the way to the bottom as intended. The whole time it took for this task alone took more than an hour.


In the end, the SpaceRail Level 2 was built in around 3 to 4 hours total. It runs fine most of the time, but needs occasional tweaks every now and then after I move it. Here is the video of the roller coaster in action.