You can find out more about my Super Monkey Ball costume at Super Monkey Ball costume.
This was my first success at putting together the sphere. Before now I had always just bent the pipes by hand when putting it together. But, this proved to require too much force. The joints kept snapping. At some point I remembered that I owned a device for bending things which I had never used. I pulled it out and used it to bend the pvc pipes and voila! This is the result.
Of course, when I measured everything out I made the measurements for the sides for a sphere without that center part. As a result, the previous version was more of an oval than a sphere. So, I pulled the ends off and cut off an appropriate amount of pipe and put it together this is what I got. It's really spherical now!
This is the wonderful bending device. You stick a pipe in there between the upper rollers then pull the lever to pump it up to the desired level of curvature. Then you twist a wingnut to keep it at that level and then turn the big handles to push the pipe through. The result is curved pipe!
Here I am trying it out for the first time.
Here I am continuing to roll around. The person taking the picture didn't really do a good job of actually keeping my face visible. Perhaps he thought the picture was better that way? smile
The sphere was all good so I pulled it apart and started to paint it. I did this once or twice per day for about a week until I had everything painted. Sadly, the paint didn't stick to the pvc very well. It didn't even cover up the black writing on the tubes, but I stopped painting when I decided it looked good enough from a moderate distance.
Here I am trying out the costume with the sphere. The sphere is huge, but I still only just barely fit inside.
Originally I had intended to add some flat panels to the inner track of the sphere so that I could actually run in it. However, I overestimated the size of the walkways at work. I ended up having to just disassemble it here and reassemble it in the rec room at work. There just wasn't any room to do any rolling, so I didn't bother adding the panels.
Even with the pipes curved, there is still a small amount of force on some of the joints. Here is an example of how they snap. I brought a box of replacement joints to work (just in case more snapped) but ended up not needing any.
You can continue the Super Monkey Ball adventure at Halloween 2007 pictures.
This was my first success at putting together the sphere. Before now I had always just bent the pipes by hand when putting it together. But, this proved to require too much force. The joints kept snapping. At some point I remembered that I owned a device for bending things which I had never used. I pulled it out and used it to bend the pvc pipes and voila! This is the result.
Of course, when I measured everything out I made the measurements for the sides for a sphere without that center part. As a result, the previous version was more of an oval than a sphere. So, I pulled the ends off and cut off an appropriate amount of pipe and put it together this is what I got. It's really spherical now!
This is the wonderful bending device. You stick a pipe in there between the upper rollers then pull the lever to pump it up to the desired level of curvature. Then you twist a wingnut to keep it at that level and then turn the big handles to push the pipe through. The result is curved pipe!
Here I am trying it out for the first time.
Here I am continuing to roll around. The person taking the picture didn't really do a good job of actually keeping my face visible. Perhaps he thought the picture was better that way? smile
The sphere was all good so I pulled it apart and started to paint it. I did this once or twice per day for about a week until I had everything painted. Sadly, the paint didn't stick to the pvc very well. It didn't even cover up the black writing on the tubes, but I stopped painting when I decided it looked good enough from a moderate distance.
Here I am trying out the costume with the sphere. The sphere is huge, but I still only just barely fit inside.
Originally I had intended to add some flat panels to the inner track of the sphere so that I could actually run in it. However, I overestimated the size of the walkways at work. I ended up having to just disassemble it here and reassemble it in the rec room at work. There just wasn't any room to do any rolling, so I didn't bother adding the panels.
Even with the pipes curved, there is still a small amount of force on some of the joints. Here is an example of how they snap. I brought a box of replacement joints to work (just in case more snapped) but ended up not needing any.
You can continue the Super Monkey Ball adventure at Halloween 2007 pictures.
Version 5.1 last modified by Geoff Fortytwo on 11/07/2010 at 17:16
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