First Day Of Summer!! ☀ Lets Turn A Beach Ball!!

Well, this was fun and also a pain. From realizing it's almost summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) to acquiring the materials, planning, doing math, cutting, gluing, turning, and editing the video, this took 4 days. I guess that's what I get for taking a week off and not planning what I'm doing when I get back.. smh For woodworkers: What a pain this was. The idea was of course a beach ball. I wanted to do the classic 8 panel ball with 6 wedges jointed at top and bottom. 3 white panels along with two circles, plus the three colored panels. I chose Purple Heart, Paduk, and Teak for purple, red, and yellowish respectively, with the other whiteish panels being Hickory. What a selection of wood... I had to do the math to figure out what I could get from each board. I decided to stack them, then cut them into the six wedges. I minimized waste by pyramid'ing the blocks and then cut them on the bandsaw. The angle was perfect but the cut on some of them was terrible, especially the purple heart. I ended up having to make a second purple triangle as the first one was incorrect. It was the thickness of the wood and the density that made the blade wander. After cutting, gluing, and bandsaw'ing another purple heart section, I took them to the bench. At the bench, I had to flatten each face. I said before that the angle was perfect but the faces weren't perfectly flat. I had to use a hand plane to get them all perfect. Took a few hours of work (seen at the end of the video) but it was well worth it. 12 perfectly flat faces. 6 perfect equilateral triangles, each 6.5 inches (16cm) long. Fit together perfectly. The glue up was easy, no problems there. I wanted to use the drill press and a forstner bit to drill the holes for the top and bottom panels but the different densities of wood made it too unstable. I had to do it on the lathe. I was able to get a decently centered mortise which was essential for that part. Still tough to turn though. Roughing it out to round helped stabilize it. The top and bottom panels were fit perfectly and the beach ball saga could begin... Since it's a sphere, I start by making it a cylinder. Then I rough turn a sphere-ish shape with the ends. Here I used a replicating tool to get it as close to round as possible. Once that was done, I could mount it between two cups and turn the sphe..... No, the cups weren't right. I ended up having to make new cups that wouldn't explode while I was turning. Now I could turn a sphere. If I had to do it again, I'd make the cups smaller so they held less of the ball at once. It introduced too much vibration. Turning a sphere with 4 woods of different densities is no easy task. It looks perfect but it's not. It's a bit wobbly and would have taken hours to get perfect. Close enough for now though. Sanded to 320 grit with 1 coats of polyurethane that I then had to sand off. The purple heart was overworked and turned brown. I had to sand it down and take a torch to it to bring the purple back out. It was well worth it. And here we are. A beach ball! As an aside, if you've made it this far, the ball weighs about 3.7lbs or 1.6kg! It's HEAVY! TL;DR - This was a lot of work! Video: All video was shot on a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. The project was edited in HitFilm and the thumbnail was created using Photoshop. This video was going to be 20 minutes long if I didn't speed it up so much. Mostly done during the sphere turning portion. It's fairly simple and really not worth watching slow. I turn it mostly round, stop the lathe, reorient the piece, then turn that bit round. I repeat this process, changing the orientation every few minutes, dozens of times until it's a nearly perfect sphere. Music track: Downtown by Moavii Source: https://freetouse.com/music Royalty Free Background Music Chapters: 0:00 - Cutting the wood 1:50 - Gluing the thing together 2:12 - Top and bottom? No, rough turning... 3:54 - Top and bottom panels for real this time. 6:22 - Rough turning a sphere 6:58 - Sphere time! 8:55 - Beach time?!?! 9:38 - ????