The World of LEGO GBC.
Do you know what a GBC is? If you answered ‘yes’ to that, then you are a true geek, and I’m Proud of you…. If you answered ‘no’, then read on.
GBC stands for Great Ball Contraption. This is basically a mechanical contraption built from Lego or Lego Technic parts that is designed to move little balls from the input of the contraption to the output.
Sounds simple right? Well until a few months ago I had never heard of this, and I have been a fan of Lego all my life. I just happened to find a video on YouTube when searching for something else. Since then I have been hooked on it.
The GBC world even have their own GBC conventions where all the individual builders come together, and this is the cool part, they link their modules together to make one continuous GBC. This is possible by each of them following a set of guidelines about the build, such as the height of the input and output of the module and how many balls it can handle at once. These guidelines then make sure all the connected modules are able to keep moving the balls without any human interference.
The Balls used are lightweight toy soccer balls or basketballs from Lego. Which in fact are very difficult to find these days. Apparently they were discontinued by Lego some years ago, but the popularity of the GBC has changed that, Lego now do produce the balls again.
There are some good resources for more information on GBC listed below. I plan to put alot more info on the pages of this site also. check back soon.
http://greatballcontraption.com
And just to temp you in and explain exactly what this is all about, here is a video of the World record GBC.
