Steel sphere fire pit

Colby · Thu May 14, 2020 11:42 pm

Hi guys,
As the title indicates, I’m looking for a steel sphere to make into a fire “ball”. Anyone have suggestions where to get one?
Or how to make one by joining two half spheres?
It looks like if you joined two halves together it wouldn’t be round, more like almost round with a ridge in the middle. What’s the process to making it actually round?
Do you just eyeball it and trial and error until you get the right dimensions?

TIA

Colby

Poland308 · Fri May 15, 2020 12:11 am

Formed half spheres are a special order item. There are companies that specialize in forming caps for pipe and tanks, that’s who you need to find.

JayWal · Fri May 15, 2020 12:57 pm

Here's a fun design I was fooling around with, perfect way to use up scrap sheet metal. Sorry for the bad pictures but it's actually pretty simple.

You need just 2 different shapes, 5 sided and 6 sided polygons, but the length of the sides HAS to be the same on both shapes, and itll all fit together giving you a sphere. Like a soccer ball pattern.

If you wanted to geek out you can cut a whole pile of triangles and basically build a geodesic dome. I went for this simpler design tho.

: 20200515_114911.jpg (63.36 KiB) Viewed 2820 times

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LtBadd · Fri May 15, 2020 6:03 pm

JayWal, very nice, it looks like you have a 5 on the bottom (flat) then a row of 6 (sided) then alternating 5 and 6?

JayWal · Fri May 15, 2020 9:36 pm

Yeah that's right. Theres really no wrong way to assemble it if you cut the pieces right.

If you wanted to go simpler you could use just 5 sided pieces, much bigger ones tho. Giving you a 3D Pentagon. It's too squarish for my liking so I usually make this design.

I had a soccer ball to help me the first time, but it's pretty simple once my monkey brain figured it out.

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BillE.Dee · Sat May 16, 2020 7:43 am

I tried to make a mini one of those....had a heck of a time keeping the cuts right. The one I was working on had some squares in it also. Finally put it all up, mowed the lawn and had a barley pop or so.

JayWal · Sat May 16, 2020 8:14 am

BillE.Dee wrote:I tried to make a mini one of those....had a heck of a time keeping the cuts right. The one I was working on had some squares in it also. Finally put it all up, mowed the lawn and had a barley pop or so.

Cutting them is a lot harder than it looks, the cuts have to be really precise. Otherwise you have big gaps everywhere. And of course more gaps mean more barely pop and it all goes downhill from there.

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BillE.Dee · Sun May 17, 2020 7:16 am

Jay, how did ya get the cuts to equal out ? I "thought" that I measured them and cut the lines and still had some longer than others and ... well ... more barley pops ... ya know.

JayWal · Sun May 17, 2020 12:48 pm

Drew them up on CAD, printed em on some heavier paper, cut it out and used it to trace onto the sheet metal. Zipcut from there. Was pretty tedious, I'm holding out till I can get my homebrew CNC table running and do it the easy way

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chickenfarmer · Thu May 28, 2020 9:37 am

JayWal wrote:Here's a fun design I was fooling around with, perfect way to use up scrap sheet metal. Sorry for the bad pictures but it's actually pretty simple.

You need just 2 different shapes, 5 sided and 6 sided polygons, but the length of the sides HAS to be the same on both shapes, and itll all fit together giving you a sphere. Like a soccer ball pattern.

If you wanted to geek out you can cut a whole pile of triangles and basically build a geodesic dome. I went for this simpler design tho.
20200515_114911.jpg
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That's super cool! Did you end up making a full sphere or is that finished? I'm guessing it's a firepit?

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