Posted By Dan Swearingen on November 16, 2009

Lots of trial and error learning goes on in our workshops. Sometimes the emphasis is on “error.”

One of our students from an early workshop, Reggie, wanted to make a globe. We said “sure.” Our strategy was to build it out of layers of pine — and that was REALLY hard.

We all took turns rasping and sanding that #$%@ thing:

We made a “skin” for it using gords painstakingly laid out with huge rulers and large homemade compasses and Reggie drew his ideas of an old-fashioned map onto them.

In the end we had an OK first effort definitely falling into the “Done Is Good” category.

If we were going to do it again I’d unhesitatingly buy a big wood lathe and simply turn the big ball on a lathe.

Or, I’d take other’s beautiful work as a good example:

Today I saw this great project at the MAKE blog

Image by davesbit from Flickr

From MAKE: Flickr member davesbit built a globe by making a mold from a beach ball, and designed a map for it using The Generic Mapping Tools.

The globe is about 20 inches in diameter, made from fiberglass and filled with foam. The map parts are built with the Generic Mapping Tools and glued on…

Making-of photos on the Flickr photo page.

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This entry was posted by Dan Swearingen on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Project Ideas, Student Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.