Marx Mystery Spaceship

The Marx Mystery Spaceship.

Here's the story. I must have been eight or nine years old. I had some money that people had given me as Christmas gifts. My grandmother took me shopping to Lesley's Stores in Ferndale..a small department store. In a hidden corner of the store, a man was demonstrating this toy. I fell in love with it instantly. It appeared to be able to defy gravity.  The curious thing about it though was that I never ever came across anybody else that had one. Friends would visit my house and when I showed it to them, their jaw would hit the floor.

I recently re-discovered it.Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It has lost its cranking handle and the internal mechanism doesn't turn the gyro wheel.

Here is the sort of thing that it could do.

I'd have liked to have tried to repair it but I simply couldn't find a way in to the device. It was then that I came across an organisation called Repair Cafe. 

"Repair Cafes are free accessible meetings that rotate to repair (together). At the site where the Repair Café held, tools and materials are available to carry out all possible repairs. On clothing, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, toys, etc. Also present expert volunteers, with repair and knowledge - skills in many areas."

I discovered that the two closest Repair Cafes to my home were actually about fifty miles away but then I heard about one opening just down the road from my home. I contacted the organisers......and they were delighted to hear from me after all, if they could repair a space-ship then they could probably repair anything. I attended their first ever meeting on April 1st 2017.


I met a volunteer called Mark. Together we decided that probably the best way to gain access to the internal workings of the device would be with a saw. There really was no turning back now.

It didn't appear too hard to saw the spaceship in half. Soon, we were inside the device.

As you can see, the device has a large flywheel inside it. This turns in order to create the gyroscopic action which drives the machine. The yellow flecks over the wheel are simply pieces of plastic from the saw.

Here was the problem. There is a little metal gearbox attached to the external casing. There is a small plastic collar which helps to keep the spindles of the gyro in place. Part of this collar had broken off. Mark created a repair my bending a small coat hook around the collar. 

We discovered another problem though. The gearbox turns a cog on the spindle of the flywheel. There is a spring inside which releases the mechanism when the gyro is spinning. Unfortunately, this spring had broken and at the moment, we can't see a way in to the gearbox.

We haven't given up on this repair though. Maybe there is a way in? Maybe there is another way to drive the gyro, possibly by fixing some sort of system using Lego gears?