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 going to 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. 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 interlinking 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 the machine shop hollow out the ball using a lathe once that was done, we were left with two shells, and now i just need to fill it with some engineering magic and to do that, i need to get myself To london, with the trusty four second travel montage, and the reason i needed to get to london was because this is james breton, and this is his house. 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, iron man or hulk buster 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. 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 pull 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 the 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 blow the Ball straight: if you extend that straight line out, you would need to pull 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. 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 i suck at bowling and nobody likes me so to get my street cred back.

I clicked the switch on and explained i actually had jedi powers and then i use said jedi powers to steer the ball, get some strikes and reclaim my high five privileges, and it didn't take that long to catch on to the secret. That rolling strikes was just directly proportional to how much you leaned you did it again. You.