In June, I had Sisyphus back in the shop to upgrade a problem in the logic house at the top of the tower. When I first built it, I used Masonite, and glued the body together, which meant I counldn't see what was going on or open it to repair problems. This worked well enough, but finally was causing failures of the whole system as balls jammed up in the house. I rebuilt it out of plexiglass, and made the whole thing easy to service. In the process, I discovered a whole raft of failure modes that had never occured to me! Such is mechanical design. You never "fix" everthing, only those things you can think about. It's only a matter of time before reality shows you something new to consider. While I did the upgrade to the house mecanism, I added windows so that folks can see some of the action as the balls flow through the logic box.

I also decided to finish off the base of Sisyphus. It was just bare Masonite, and it detracted from the rest of the piece. I had intended to landscape it, but never gotten around to it. I also had a concept piece called War Games, which I wanted to inlay into the bottom of Sisyphus. War Games is a field sport between two species, humans and large ants. The humans use radio controlled minature tanks, and the ants play as themselves. This is a sporting event with scoreboard, and spectators of both speices. I added small hills to finish out the concept.

This shows the entire base of the upgraded Sisyphus.

Here is a close up of the War Games playing field with spectators.

Off to the side is a crew working of maintaining one of the tanks, with plenty of input from spectators.

The ant hole is off to one corner of the piece.

This group of "visitors from out of town" is being guided around by some of the locals.

The landscaping covers the entire base of Sisyphus.