[David Brinza]

Originally Posted by Abwehr

Fantastic idea and execution. My only concern is that the extra "stiffness" will make the balls behave differently in some mechanisms.

Have you seen this thread? Maybe polypropylene could be used in the future?

At the time the kit was being designed, we knew that the plastic strips in the official Orbit ball were not lexan. The Orbit ball strips are injection-molded PP with "lips" along the edges and short studs and holes at the ends for joining (with heat). Also, we had a few Orbit balls break during testing and rough handling. We decided that the kits should produce much more rugged balls (given the cost and effort to make the balls). The Gus ball approach was examined for ways to reduce the labor for teams to assemble balls. Providing pre-made fabric tubes was one of the time-savers we selected. We also chose a joining method that's faster and easier than riveting. The high-strength adhesive patches make joining the hoops very easy, but probably wouldn't work quite as well on polypropylene.

As usually found in the engineering and manufacturing world, some trade-offs had to be made. The parents who put the kits together decided that durability and relative ease of construction was a better option for these practice balls than attempting to make a true replica of the Orbit ball.

In case you're wondering, the parents first explored the option of buying Orbit balls from Blip Toys in mass quantities. The minimum order was $50,000 with minimum six-week delivery from China. Being familiar with the import process they knew that 6-weeks could really be 10 or more weeks, so this wasn't a viable option. Hence the kits...