Rubber bands can be used to power a lot of homemade toys, some of which we've covered here. Winding them up and seeing them go can be a good time, especially for the ones that do things like defy gravity. But sometimes it can be just as fun to see rubber bands work in concert with gravity.
That's where we find YouTuber Kaplamino, who apparently usually spends a lot of time building courses out of domino blocks just to knock them down, so we can all scratch that itch in our brains to see some action come together perfectly. Another approach to their projects is building marble courses, getting from one point to another using just gravity and set-up block barriers.
But keeping that marble's momentum going can be tough, and Kaplamino finds a fun way to do it: By using rubber bands as bumpers and launchers throughout the course. They even kick the whole video off with a sliding bumper, which must've been really tough to set up.
The marbles ricochet off of bumpers throughout the video, but some of the most inventive parts are the blocks that are spring-loaded with rubber bands set to go off when the marble collides with them, setting them off like a trap and sending the marble careening along. There's even one that serves as both a bumper, and then a launcher in a pretty clever bit of redirection. Getting those angles right had to take a lot of planning and practice, not unlike the way engineers approach designs with other rubber products.
Bringing rubber bands into the process definitely gave the courses a fun jolt of kinetic action, and regardless, it's always satisfying to watch a setup like this go off without a hitch.
Kyle Brown is a reporter for Rubber & Plastics News who watched a lot of Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye while growing up. Follow him on Twitter at @kbrownRPN.