Have you ever found the need to make your own wooden balls for a project? To be frank, we haven’t either! But seriously — how would you do it? Well, lucky for us, Hackaday Alum [Jeremy Cook] has experimented with a few different methods.
He was originally inspired by this video from [Philip Stephens] who makes them completely by hand using a hand-made hole saw. Not wanting to spend hours making a ball, he thought about ways to automate it — well, kind of.
His first attempt was to use a mill and a rudimentary rotary index table consisting of a wood clamp — Hold a wooden dowel in place, hole saw halfway through, rotate in the clamp, repeat times infinity. Eventually you’ll be left with a wooden ball whose sharp edges you can just break off. Not very satisfied with this method, he discovered a Reddit thread on making wooden balls with a rather ingenious method… Stick around after the break to see how.
First up is the rather slow hole saw method:
But here’s the cooler way to do it. Orbital sander, plus a tube — let the wood bounce around and quickly erode into a perfect sphere!