One day, we hope, we’ll be as awesome as [Keith Holaman]. He makes humongous wooden balls with a chainsaw, crane, and a truck-mounted lathe.
[Keith] got his start making wooden balls on a small lathe at home. For some reason he always wanted to make a bigger wooden ball, but his equipment at the time couldn’t handle this size in [Keith]’s imagination.
To make his gigantic wooden balls, [Keith] skulks around his local forest looking for downed trees and stumps. After getting these huge logs home, he roughs out the sphere with a chainsaw, mounts a chuck on the log with huge bolts, and attached it to a diesel motor.
Because the logs are so huge, he can’t turn the log very fast. to remove a whole lot of wood very quickly, [Keith] spins his tool head at a few thousand RPM.
There aren’t many build details or even an indication of how big these wooden balls are. We’d guess they’re easily over a meter in diameter. If anyone knows where we can see these balls in person, drop a note in the comments.
I’m WAAAAAAY to immature to handle watching this.
LMAO yeah. I know what you mean.
“If anyone knows where we can see these balls in person, drop a note in the comments.”
Check out a ‘turning’ group in your town. Large wooden balls are fairly common.
Indeed.
The hand carved ones are impressive though:
http://www.balifurnish.com/home-interior-products-wood-crafts/teak-wood-decor-indonesia/5-large-balls-from-wood-indonesia.html
http://www.balifurnish.com/home-interior-products-wood-crafts/teak-wood-decor-indonesia/teak-wood-balls.html
Local guy makes these on a fairly ‘traditional’ unmodified lathe:
http://www.csbasicsinc.com/acc_htmls/access10.html
This one might be the largest I’ve seen:
http://simon11-wwwadventuresinlandscapes.blogspot.com/2010/10/all-change.html
16-18″ balls are common.. sure…
Check out the video, those are 4-5 feet across. That’s a whole nother scale of “big turning.”
Objects larger than 48″ are common unless it’s a highschool club.
What’s more impressive is that they turn those with hand tools and not a nearly hands-free system like this.
Not what I’d think of as hacking, but very cool!
Tom the Brat, You are just too caught up in the Balls. The guy hacked a 10,000 truck to make his balls
OOPS ……10,000 pound truck…..
It’s a Freightliner 60 on a short frame with an unknown type of articulated crane with a hoist. Odd but fun combination. It probably weights in excess of 10,000 pounds (normal length box truck runs about 14k) but could be licensed to haul up to 34,000ish depending on state. Though with such a short frame he is likely to be maxing out lightweight bridge (as on most rural roads) limits as it is.
This thing was not cheap. If you knew what you were doing a high mileage truck with a used knuckle boom could be scored and assembled for less than $30,000. It would not be as versatile as this guy, though could lift more.
Personally I would find it hard to not try and make a design involving a moffett style forklift. A big honking m55 with 4-way steering, add an aux hydraulic booster and rotary. Tada! Would be impressively fun but so much more expensive.
Saw something similar at the Bohemian Hotel in Savannah, GA, at the entrance…
here is a link – they were awesome.
http://www.fivestaralliance.com/4star-hotels/savannah-ga/the-bohemian-hotel-savannah-riverfront-autograph-collection/gallery/show
They are going to need one large billiard table!
Perhaps, a telegraph pole for a cue stick?
I was thinking of the handicap you need on a golf-course. Imagine your golf-cart-size-of-a-truck and handling a club-size-of-a-rocket-tower.
Might actually par the whole course with one ball covering all holes at once ;-)
ACDC still has the biggest balls of them all.
Some balls are held for charity,
and some for fancy dress
but when they’re held for pleasure
they’re the balls that I like best.
My balls are always bouncing,
to the left and to the right.
It’s my belief that my big balls
should be held every night.
Uhh… did this site turn into The Verge or something? Didn’t anyone do anything with a Bus Pirate or Arduino lately?
No. It’s definitely a step up.
You’re just mad because his balls are bigger than your’s.
@Tony
No kidding. A bus pirate hack involves ~$100 worth of components and a couple hours of environmental setup. This guy probably spent $50,000 on that truck lathe, 100s of hours building it, and ~12 hours per ball.
~$100? I think you included one too many zeros.
You’re right. There’s more work here than any silly Bus Pirate hack. However, I’m far more interested in the build process than the final product.
Without documentation, this article is just a superficial appreciation of the work. That’s why compared it to The Verge. They skimp on details, swoon over meaningless virtues, and then try to turn the products they approve of into a counter-culture.
BTW: “Didn’t anyone do anything with a Bus Pirate or Arduino lately?” was meant to be a snarky comment.
Man those are some impressive balls! Wonder if he ever has the urge to drill three holes in in one and paint it black? Anyway the huge lathe is what’s really cool about this, I wonder what else he could do with it? Maybe a a Louisville Slugger from an old phone pole.
Ok, my turn to be “that guy”:
No protective eye wear while wielding that chainsaw.! Tsk tsk…
This reminds me of “Minority Report”. I mean, why take the all that time to carve a ball to display a name on it, when you have that nice display.
Carving the balls was an anti-counterfeiting measure, The idea being that the unique grain of each piece of wood made them “impossible” to fake.
Nice build. But I don’t know about a hand operated control and dangling hood cord ends around an unguarded belt drive. Just one brain fart from disaster
I hate how “art people” always try to turn what they do into some super deep reflection on the meaning of life or the universe.
The guy carves really big wooden balls. Nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing about life, the universe, etc, it’s just big wooden balls.
I agree with you there
They need their balls to be something more, enerfor the grants, papers, and exhibitions the need for their funding, lets remember they have no real job.
“there’s a surrender to it”….
Ya, you push the ON button and let it do the work.
“..you don’t know what’s going to happen”…
Spoiler ALERT…it makes large wooden balls.
“there’s an impact a size has when it’s so huge”..
Old news. Google ‘momentum’.
“finding my pieces is sort of intuitive”…
Big stumps?
“I’m ultimately crashing these two forces together”….
Totaly…..well not so much ‘crashing’ per se, as…. ‘pushing’.
“The process is the art”…
So why do you charge money for the big hunk of wood left over?
“What I’m doing is honoring these great trees”..
How’s that now? Carving up grave robbed corpses is honorable? Tell that to my probation officer.
“As I’m carving the ball, I’m able to find so much”…
Is it wood? I bet it’s more wood.
“It’s a conversation about life and history”..
Possibly….. but I’ll bet is mostly one-way.
HaD, please no more ‘artists’ with questionable mustaches.
AWESOME XD
Lol, epic
Yup, he’s right. When it comes to balls, size matters.
Try stone, gem and quartz. Some guy in town had what it took 20-30 years ago. Up to 3-4 inches, down to polished perfection. No ends seams butts about it. Awesome to hold. Then there is the stone balls of middle America, pre-Mayan.
Amazing! I dabble in woodworking, usually in support of my machine shop projects, and this is just a fantastic build. There’s something mesmerizing about a perfect sphere that you can actually reach out and touch!
The shot at 2:11 scares me a little, though. He’s got his handle pretty close to the unshielded belt drive for the cutting tool. His hand is really close to getting pulled in to that pulley, yet his eyes are on the tool tip!
awesome!