Soccer Ball domes serving dish

[John Huber]

Here is a Soccer Ball domed serving dish I made for my wife for Mother's Day. The structure is technically called a truncated icosahedron.

The first challenge is to make hexagons and pentagons that all have exactly the same side length and have exactly correct angles between their sides. I am indebted to JohnWW of the Knots forum at Finewoodworking.com for the solution.

The second challenge is that all the joints are rubbed, because there are no parallel opposing faces to clamp with. This is aggravated because the hexagons and pentagons have a different bevel angle on their sides (67.5 and 74 degress respectively). This means the thickness of the mating edges are different. I found it was best to get the interior edges aligned and then sand off the excess exterior edge.

The wood is mahogany because I like its chatoyancy which makes all the segments change depending on the light. The finish is General Finishes Seal-A-Cell and Arm-R-Seal.

I would appreciate and comments or suggestions.

[mark page]

All I can say is patience is a virtue. Great job!!! I could not have done it.

[Jim Becker]

Very nice, John...I can only imagine the challenge all the angles presented!

[Bill Huber]

Now that took some time.

Beautiful work and I really admire someone that has the skills and patents to do it.



PS:

Great name.

[David Epperson]

I think the word is geodesic. I've attempted some of that. Lots of planning and patience required. Good job.

[Dave Shively]

Great job John! Do you have any other pictures taken as you were making them?

Dave

[John Huber]

Sorry, Dave, I didn't take any in-progress pictures. The best help that I can offer is that I partly followed Heinrich Klein's "Making a Wooden Soccerball, a Jewel of Precision" Woodcraft #47, December 1998. And I did make a prototype first, where I learned a lot (that is, made a lot of mistakes!). If you have a specific question, post it, and I will try my best to answer it.

[marky young]

I have that article and couldn't really make sense of it; difficult to understand. I have it scanned to a PDF since that magazine is out of print, it's probably legal for me to share it via email.

[Bill McNiel]

John,
You are one sick cowboy to untake such a project. Next project an Icasododecahedran (sp?) ? Very impressive, sir.

[Mort Stevens]

The structure is technically called a truncated icosahedron.

Very nice.

Around here we always called them Buckminsterfullerenes or 'bucky-balls' for short.

[Larry Browning]

I am absolutely sure the soccer ball dome was the real challenge, and I do not think I would ever attempt one! But my interest lies in the platter. I built a 6ft diameter table using the same basic sunburst segmented pattern, which was a huge challenge for me. I used 12 segments, it looks like you used 10. The center of mine looked real trashy, so I put a round inlay in the center to cover it up. How did you accomplish such tight joints without screwing up the center? Do you happen to have a CNC router to get the angles perfect? No matter how careful I was at measuring and cutting the angles, each segment was off just a little, and by the time I put in the last segment it wouldn't fit. I finally resolved it by making 2 halves and running each one through the jointer to get 2 flat edges to put together. This caused the center points to be misaligned. How did you build your platter? Also, are you not worried about wood movement causing cracks and separation?

[John C Bush]

In your spare time-- make another one, video the process, and you tube us all. Great job.