Who would have thought that golf balls have so many different colors inside. As a kid I cut open a golf ball and it exploded with a barrage of rubber bands tightly wound. Today golf balls have a variety of colors inside that represent different densities and suposably give the ball different characteristics to get to their desired location when hit.
Skywater Studios was commisioned by Parade Art to create an abstract piece of wall art for a golf resort. The original artist, Daniel Weinman thought up this unique art concept.
We specialize in unique and custom projects so this job was perfect for us. First we had to buy over 800 golf balls, then find out what color each type of ball was made of. Some balls/brands still use the rubber band bombs inside. We purchased used golf balls and some of the balls had water inside them from being at the bottom of a water hazard for long periods of time. 20% of the balls we received we could not use for whatever reason.
Our next challange was how to efficiently cut 800 golf balls in half. We made several jigs and thought it would be much quicker if we could just cut them with a chop saw. This idea quickly faded as we were shooting round white projectiles across the shop and lightning speeds. We settled on the simple band saw method using a jig to hold them in place.
With enough time and triple the amount of golf balls we could have created a color pattern or even words in the piece, but it was decided on to just be an abstract of colors. So we just kept cutting and grouped the balls in groups.
Next was to attach them to the backer board. We used our CNC to drill all the holes in the exact spot to make sure when the balls were screwed to the board they were all touching. We then made a special tool to attach the golf balls onto the screws.
This photos shows a close up of the balls screwed on the board, polished and ready to go.
