1896 Ball Puzzle

Once I saw an old ad for something called the Ball Puzzle. I was curious how that worked but couldn't find any actual examples of it (Let me know if you are aware of any!).

The mystery was recently solved.  I happend to stumble across the 1896 patent for it by Christian Hagelstein. It looks slightly different but definitely the same puzzle. In the patent, the goal was to free a little figure.

Somewhere down the line it looks like they changed it to a ball - probably because it was easier to manufacture and less likely to break.  I kept the ball (mainly out of ease of design), but otherwise tried to stick as much to the original patent as I could.

You will need two 6-mm balls, such as ones found here.  It's the same ones I used for my re-creation of the Sam Loyd Cartridge Box puzzle. For me, the assembly holds well in place just by snapping it together, but you can use glue to make sure it doesn't come apart.

Once you solve it, can you repeat it? I think a good meta challenge is try to find a way to solve it so you can do it consistently.

It's a lot easier to explain how to assemble and solve with a video, so here you go. First half shows the assembly, so you can stop there if you don't want to see the solution. Modeling the puzzle and assembling it actually didn't help me very much in solving it, so I think you can still enjoy it even if you know what the inside looks like. Good luck!