A Column of Spheres

I've seen this construction in Jan & Jane's GeoMag photo gallery and decided to build it myself with SuperMags:

Column of Spheres Column of Spheres

The column of spheres inside the tower stands without any support, other than magnetism, which is even strong enough to support it when it's lying horizontally:

Column of Spheres

I learnt very early on that just putting the SuperMag pieces together without any thought behind it wouldn't work. The key to the construction is to make the two outermost spheres of the column, the ones directly connected to the tower, magnetic with opposing poles. That way, they attract each other and the spheres between them just line up along the shortest path between them. I went so far as to make all the vertical bars (the blue ones) aligned magnetically: All the 5 red bars connected to one of the two spheres connect to it with their north pole. All blue bars connecting to those red bars (via a sphere) connect to the red bar's south poles with their north poles, and so on, until finally all the south poles of the star on the other side connect to the other sphere.

Here's another photo showing the column directly. Notice the gap between the two spheres in the middle:

Column of Spheres

Schani's SuperMag Page