Unfortunately, I cannot find a foam ball in 36", in the USA. The people carrying them, do not carry them any more, because there were not enough sales for them. Anything smaller will not work for the big lights, due to the “total surface area vs the combined port area 5% rule”
It’s not a fail!!!
A fail is not accomplishing something because you didn’t even make an attempt. This is an experiment which didn’t produce your desired results.
Another idea is to make the ball using a round balloon and paper mache kind of like this, maybe instead of newspaper you could use white printer paper…
Or for more professional results contact a place where they make Mexican Piñatas and ask them to build you one, would that work?
They are generally plastic. I have one, about 12 Inches across and the “map” just peels off, its flimsy plastic but the inner ball is strong and sturdy.
I thought about it originally, until I looked at the cost of the stuff. If you buy it in spray cans, then I would think there will be a bunch of lines where the spray streams come together, sort of like fissures, only smaller and all over. If I made a box around it and used the liquid 2 part stuff…, well, the cost would be way too high.
Anyhow, I took that option off the list. I have contacted two plastics outfits about a 36" plastic sphere made from 2 hemispheres. I imagine, just guessing, about $350 to $450 with holes and $275 to $350 without holes, but that's only a guess from a guy who was in plastics for 26+ years, so I may be way low on the price. The material cost for a ball like that would run about $10 and all the rest is overhead plus 150% markup. At least I will know the price by asking.
I am trying to think of a way to make a 36” styrofoam sphere by starting with a sllightly larger styrofoam cube.
Surely it can be done and with a more simple jig than I can currently envision.
The styrofoam cube would be easy enough to build by gluing blocks of the foam together.
Thinking out loud here, the outside of the enclosure doesn’t need to be a sphere, only the inside.
So starting with a cube, it could be quartered, and within each section a radius removed to form a perfect sphere inside when reassembled. Cube on the outside, sphere on the inside.
As for how to radius the interiors, I do not know, but perhaps someone here will