- This bowling ball can get you a strike every time,
because after you bowl it,
you simply lean in the direction you want the ball to turn.
This idea has been on my bucket list for over three years,
so today I'm gonna tell you how we made it,
how exactly it works,
and what happens when you take it bowling
but neglect to tell the people you're bowling with
about your slight advantage.
- Oh.
- So this trick ball looks and feels like
a normal bowling ball,
and that's because it's made from a real bowling ball.
Step one on this project was to harness my inner
Lincoln and Dan to see what's inside an actual bowling ball.
The first thing we discovered is that they aren't symmetric.
That means the center of mass
isn't at the actual center point of the ball.
I won't get into physics here,
but this is one factor that helps the pros
curve the ball as much as they do.
Next, I had my buddy Mark, who owns a machine shop,
hollow out the ball using a lathe.
Once that was done, we were left with two shells
and now I just needed to fill it
with some engineering magic.
And to do that, I need to get myself to London
with a trustee four second travel montage.
(upbeat music)
And the reason I needed to get to London
was because this is James Bruton and this is his house.
And what you should know about James,
aside from the fact that he's a mechanical,
electrical engineer genius is he used to be a toy designer.
And I have so much respect for toy designers
because they have to come up with really clever designs
like this guy here
where you could see all of this action
powered by a single spring so it can remain inexpensive.
And his super clever designs include this robot
you could control using this puppet robot
or this real life Ironman or Hulkbuster suit,
or a bunch of really cool BB-8s.
I had a basic idea for the mechanism in the ball,
and I knew I wanted the guts to be sort of like a BB-8.
So I reached out to him
and in the spirit of full disclosure,
it was his expertise
that really made this whole thing possible.
So if you enjoy seeing awesome stuff like this,
you really need to go check out his videos
and subscribe to his channel.
And so after geeking out in his house
for way longer than we should have,
we put the ball together
and headed to a proper British bowling alley
for the first official test.
We started at pretty low speeds
just to prove we had things basically correct.
Then we started getting fancy
and eventually worked up to hitting some pins.
Yeah.
That is a cool feeling.
And the reason I could control the ball by leaning
is because I have this little board taped to my back
that has an inertial measurement unit on it
that can sense the orientation.
So if I lean left, it sends that command back to the ball
using radio waves,
and then the ball has a receiver
that gets the signal to turn left.
And then this Arduino, which is the brains of the operation,
tells the servo motor how much to rotate,
which then rotates this heavy pendulum to the left.
And that radically alters the center of gravity,
and it starts turning that way in response,
just like if you want to turn on a bike
you adjust your center of gravity by leaning into the turn.
And if I want to bowl normal
I can just click this limit switch
and it will ignore all inputs.
But as soon as I click it again,
then it will once again steer whichever way I lean.
And at first we weren't really getting strikes
but that's because my technique was wrong.
Hitting the pins dead straight on
will tend to leave the corner pins like this.
To get a perfect strike,
the ball needs to approach the pin
somewhere between three and six degrees from this point.
And that's because at that angle,
the ball hits this first pin
and the normal force vector takes out
all of these pins in a line
and then the ball contacts this next pin here,
and it takes out all of these pins in a line,
and then the ball's momentum takes out the final three.
Professional bowlers get their ball to hit the pins
at this side angle by curving the ball.
And you kind of have to do that
because if you suck at bowling like me
and you can only bowl the ball straight,
if you extend that straight line out,
you would need to bowl from the other lane over.
But technically that's not allowed.
And so at that point, your remaining strategies
are either bad CGI or mechanical engineering,
and we chose the latter.
Once I got the angle right,
we started locking in the strikes.
In addition to testing our ball,
we got to see the machine they used to oil the lanes
and the crazy fascinating machine
that clears and resets the pin after every frame,
but that's a topic for another video.
And so with everything working perfectly,
it was time for the final test to see how it performed
in real life.
(upbeat music)
So we arranged to meet some of our family friends
at the local bowling alley.
And at first I tried bowling normally
with the controls turned off,
but it turns out without the aid of mechanical engineering,
- Gutter ball.
- I suck it bowling. - You're bad at bowling.
- [Mark] And nobody likes me.
So to get my street cred back, I clicked the switch on
and explained I actually had Jedi powers.
- [Child] Whoa.
- [Mark] And then I used said Jedi powers to steer the ball,
get some strikes, and reclaim my high five privileges.
(upbeat music)
(kids cheering)
And it didn't take them long to catch onto the secret
that rolling strikes was just directly proportional
to how much you leaned.
(bowling pins crashing)
(upbeat music)
- You cheated again Mawk Rova.
(upbeat music)