I sat with my son to start working on some puzzles but on the first one I found that the quality of the parts left something to be desired! After building it and starting I found a few critical problems 1. The balls don’t come out one at a time - as they roll into the “distributor wheel” the weight of the balls is enough to push the wheel down so they all just kind of flow through before the previous one has reached the bottom. 2- the counterweight on the green gates isn’t sufficient to reset them all the time (they sometimes work) and when they don’t reset the balls go off randomly. Solution?
Hi Iain,
Thanks for posting the message. It sounds like you’re having two problems:
1) The balls are flowing through the ball releasers on top.
This only happens if the balance is really far off. Is there a chance that you didn’t put the counterweights (one red and one blue ball) in the levers near the bottom of the board? Or maybe you didn’t connect the ball releasers to the levers on the backside of the board? I’d check those two things first. Then, check to see if you have big rubber washers stuffed into the back of the black levers. They should have been stuffed in there by the factory.
2) The ramps don’t return to their original positions.
The only reason I can think of for this to happen is if you have a lot of balls falling through at once - in that case you can end up with a ball sitting on the back of a ramp. After that happens, the ramp will get stuck and won’t turn. Once you fix the first problem, you’ll only have one ball falling through at a time and this shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Please tell me if this solves your problems. Thanks again,
Paul
Thought I’d post another problem some people have run into in case someone lands here looking for this.
If you’re having a problem where one of the levers has trouble going all the way down, check the long connector on the backside of the board. Take it off and look in the two holes on each end. You’ll probably see a little extra plastic inside one of the holes.
To fix the problem, either cut out the little bit of extra plastic with a knife or shove a pen in the hole to push it aside.
Paul