We Can Watch This Slinky Machine All Day

The Slinky has been entertaining young and old alike since its invention in the 1940s, and has even been used in applications such as a radio antenna and physics teaching tool. While it’s fun to see it fold over itself and “walk” down a properly inclined surface, or even stairs, at some point the fun stops and it just sits there. You can of course start the process over easily enough, but what about a machine to do it for you—a Slinky treadmill you might say?

Jimmy Demello has actually created such a miniature treadmill for his Slinky. It resembles a benchtop belt grinder, and is set at an angle to the floor to allow the coil to fold over and over. Demello narrates a disassembly of the device in the video below, going over how he built it, and the parts that he used. It's then demonstrated starting at 18:38. If you’re wondering to the age old YouTube video question of “WILL IT WORK?” yes, yes it does, though there’s naturally quite a bit of tweaking involved.

His record for that iteration is 91 slinks, though he was later able to boost that number up to 208. One thing that helped was that in the original version he stapled the belt together (made out of a piece of canvass from a painting), but revised it to stitching to make the surface more smooth. Motor speed is handled by a potentiometer-adjusted power supply, putting out 7.3 volts to get it walking. Demello notes that he may try PWM control to smooth things out in the future, and one could see it walking much further with the proper setup.