Yes, it IS true! After more than one year of constructing I finally finished my knex ball machine Catastropha!
It has 11 lifts and 17 paths!
For a full description and the full picture gallery please view http://www.sorunome.de/knex/ballmachines/catastropha/
See below for the vid!

you have way to much time on your hands

Very nice work! I could personally never do anything like this with Kinex, I was always bad with them (I'm better suited for sturdy structure design with Legos, like houses, buildings, large ships, etc.)



You have way too little respect for other people's hard work.

Thanks a LOT! It's always good to hear that people like my work!

I too was always more of a LEGO fan than a K'Nex fan, but this is very impressive work. You'll make a very creative engineer one day, Sorunome.

Well, to be honest, I at the moment my plan is to study IT, not engineering.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't IT at its core just the process of getting chunks of data(like the balls in your contraption) from one place to another as efficiently as possible?

Well, I meant programming......In german what I mean is "Informatik"

Ok, for anyone who is interested, I started taking down this ball machine, now it is just one big knex pile Here are pics!

Whoa. I'm going to guess a total of 4,000 pieces.

ok, I count that guess, even thought you didn't post there.

Haha, you don't have to if you don't want. I'm just stunned at the giant pile of pieces that that turned into.

You should use the pieces to build frames for massive structures, which you can then cover with paper. I did that once and made a 4-foot-long starbase. With what you have there, you could build a whole city in miniature.

Well, I'm planning currently to build a new ball machine...

Why...
Why would you destroy something so beautiful...

That was AWESOME!! Congrats for all the hard work; it paid off

I'm just as much a Lego person as I am a K'nex person; and I could play with both forever! My personal goal is to make a mechanical computer, which could be done with either Legos or K'nex (you could use a pivot/lever in place of the gears):

Blue buffers hold hold states; Red relays propagate some input when they are "clocked" with the purple rod; Green relays simply let a signal through, but also send an opposing signal when clocked. A machine would use one clock to propagate signals from inputs to outputs (I), and another to move the signals from outputs to the next inputs (J). This machine is X = OR(A,B,C)

... Would you (or anyone else) be willing to use my design to make a digital system? (My wife probably wouldn't approve of my buying tons of k'nex or legos...)

If I were you, I'd try organizing hundreds, if not thousands, of lego or k'nex(you'll have to either pick one or be ready to integrate both) enthusiast programmers and engineers nationwide to combine their collections and expertise in one place with the goal of building that.

Hunderts of knex isn't that much...... And I think I'm at the moment to busy with school, sorry. And then I'm going to the US for a year (without knex) and after that maybe.

Anyways, The contest on guessing pieces is over, the hole number of pieces is 25,422!

Correct, Sorunome! That diagram would take at least 100 k'nex pieces (assuming you use an orange straight connector in place of a gear, and rods in place of ... toothed rods). For the blue device, the orange piece is stationary; for the red device, the pivot through the orange piece moves, as well as the rods connected to it (but input rods can block one of them); and for the green one, one of the rods moves straight through, but the orange piece connects it to another rod so that when the pivot is moved forward, it acts like the blue device.

I said hundreds of knex enthusiasts, not hundreds of knex pieces. The number of pieces you'd need for a full digital mechanical computer would in in the hundreds of thousands if not over a million. However, getting a thousand or so knex enthusiasts to all combine their sets could get the numbers you need.