Engineering student builds working pinball machine from thousands of K'nex pieces

Engineering student Andrew Locke has built a working pinball machine using tens of thousands of pieces of K'nex, a construction toy for children.

Locke amassed sets of K'nex every Christmas since childhood, he told Reuters. This year he decided to construct a functioning pinball machine using the construction toy, developing the complex project from the plastic K'nex pieces over the course of four months. The finished product is estimated to be comprised of roughly 20 thousand K'nex parts, including 40 pieces from the original set he first received 16 years ago.

His pinball machine features a working belt and pulley system that catches the pinball and raises it to the top of a multi-level series of sloping tracks, which looks similar to a miniaturized roller coaster.