Aspire hits another home run!

[foampro]

Here is our latest project. We built two 30" styrofoam baseballs for Fort Wayne Stadium. We used Aspire to design the stitching. I am still amazed at how easy Aspire is to use. The hardest part was scaling the stitching to fit the spheres. They were cut on out PRSAlpha ShopBot. The spheres were cut on our cnc hotwire machine. Once they were assembled we plastic coated them and primed them so they are ready for paint.

[RoutnAbout]

Glen, Those look great. I'm assuming that these are for the new Stadium their building for downtown?
Any Idea when their installing these? It'd be neat to see them. I could take some installed photos for you. Its about50-60 mile from here.

[moto633]

Hey Glen,

NICE BALLS sorry couldn't resist that one!!

Did you layer the spheres to make the balls or can you cut those completely on the hot wire??

Thanks for sharing your cool work,
Nick

[metalworkz]

Wow, those balls look great! I too am curious to know more about the actual cutting of the spheres and the method used to place the threads on the spheres? Thanks for sharing with us!

[foampro]

We have a large hotwire machine with a turn table. We use 1 2D drawing and turn the table 5 degrees and cut the profile about 35 times. Took about 3 hours to cut it. We also had to cut the centerout so the sign company could put a 3" pipe inside to mount it. The stitch work sucked to be honest. First I drew it up to look like the two pieces of leather that makes up the baseball. WAY wrong. Then I took my real baseball and started using paper templates to get the pattern correct and the stitching to scale. Since a real baseball is 3" I was able to multiply all measurements by 10. I redrew it over again in Aspire and recut them. Each strip on the picture tool about 2 hours for a total of 8 hours. I know I could have used other bits and probably could have done things differently to speed it up. I used a 1/8 ball nose at 6ipm with 40 step over. One pass. To apply the stitches I pinned it to the ball and had to cut and splice in a couple spots to get it all to look correct and line up. Then I used foam contact cement. One shot with that stuff. If it sticks in the wrong spot your screwed. Then we sprayed it with plastic and primed it. The sign company we built it for will do the finish paint work.

[steve4460]

Cool stuff Glen . Keep it up .
Stephan www.windwardsigns.com