It's ok, just try to be careful (especially when posting fast). As for the machine a video would be nice when finished. What I wish is that it was easy to create plans for the model so other people could build it with their own pieces, but again I bet that some people might give up 25% through

Ok, so, i made a totally new gearbox, and now the lift is working! I still need to add entrance and exit for the balls, though

How much battery power does that machine take by the way? (or if you're not using any battery, how big is the electricity bill?)

Looks nice, by the way!

Ok thanks for the info. With my Knex stuff I had two motors IIRC, but I noticed indeed that batteries were drained incredibly fast. On top of that the motors were nowhere close to strong enough to make a fan work, so I got better speed when making it work by hand. Even then, I could use ways to make it much faster, although not too much, since otherwise some of the pieces could snap.

I think mine was one of the weakest motor at the time. It was the red rectangular one that was wired to a transparent rectangular thing with gears inside. It was particularly weak, because if using one big gear to make a smaller one spin faster, as soon as you added another set of gears like that to make things spin even faster, it would just barely even be able to move, because it required more force to rotate than the motor could handle. If I added another set of gears and rotated them manually, it could damage my pieces or the gears.

I would probably not have gotten that many problems if I had more pieces and gears to make everything more solid, though. I only had two or three K'nex sets IIRC (the yellow suitcase from the late 90's and a smaller suitcase I forgot the color of, and I think I got one of my motors as standalone or with a different smaller set)

The first one, but mine was more rectangular (the one you posted was probably a redesign or enhanced version). Back in 1997-98 my mom stopped buying LEGO's and introduced us to K'nex, because she felt that LEGO's were getting too expensive and she could no longer afford to buy them, so she went with the alternative, and darn it was cool. Sadly, it was around my final years of interests in building stuff before I role-play with lego figurines. In 2000 I suddenly lost interest in LEGO's and K'nex entirely.

Cool idea I guess lol, more power FTW (although don't go overboard to not blow damage it ). And I like the name Apocalyptica. Just make sure that on Youtube it is clear in the title that it's the machine name, not a fan-made videoclip of the Apocalyptica music band using Knex footages, else some people will probably downrate it for not using Apocalyptica music.