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.