mlingojones.com

Ball Pit

Recently Randall Munroe (author of the webcomic xkcd) wrote a blag entry about creating a ball pit in his room. I decided it would be fun to plan one out for myself.

In the blag entry is a link to a calculator that helps you figure out how many balls you'll need (and how much it will cost) to make a ball pit of a certain size. After measuring my room, I decided my ball pit would be 5' x 5', and 2' deep. I originally wanted it to be 4' deep, but then I realized just how deep that really is. The 2' wasn't arbitrary, though: it's the height of my bed, which would be used as a wall to contain the balls.

Mr. Munroe suggested crush-proof balls, which can be found here. I took the suggestion of the calculator site and used 74% packing efficiency, which came out to 565 balls. I added a pack of 500 balls and a pack of 100 on the Tinker Tots site, which came out to $134, not including shipping.

The other problem I had was containing the balls. I had planned to use my bed to keep them contained on one side and the corner of my room for the other two sides, which left one side unaccounted for. I needed a 5' x 2' wall to contain the balls on that side. My first instinct was to look at those pet gates, but none of them were wide enough. A couple of friends pointed me to these sort of stackable cubbies (the cubby side, obviously, would face outward). I could put together as many as I wanted, and the dimensions more or less exactly fit my proposed ball pit. For a more sturdy way to keep them together, my friend pointed me to these tie wraps, which seems to be the right choice since Mr. Munroe used them for his ball pit (look closely at the pictures and you can see tie wraps holding them together).

My remaining problem is how to attach the cubbies to my wall and my bed. I'm thinking those screws with the eyes at the end, which would be tie-wrapped to the cubbies.

Oh, and the last remaining problem is that certain restrictions (read: parents) prevent me from building this where I live now. When I get my own place, I'll look back here and actually build one.