Fla. man creates giant rubber band ball
LAUDERHILL (AP) – Look, over there. Under that blue tarp in a suburban driveway. That thing that’s the size of a Smart car?
It’s Joel Waul’s rubber band ball.
Waul has spent the last six years carefully wrapping and linking and stretching rubber bands of various sizes into the ball shape. The Guinness Book of World Records declared it the world’s largest rubber band ball in 2008.
On Thursday, Waul said goodbye to his creation. A team from Ripley’s Believe it or Not came to his house with a crane and hauled the 6-foot, 7-inch tall, 9,032-pound behemoth away on a large, flatbed truck.
“It’s a little bit sad to see it go, but it’s going to be appreciated by thousands and hopefully millions of people in Ripley’s museum to see and wonder, ‘What was this guy thinking?’ ” Waul said.
The ball will eventually be displayed in a far-off museum yet to be determined, so folks can marvel at Waul’s obsession.
Waul got the idea six years ago, when he saw a Ripley’s television special that showed the then-largest rubber band ball being dropped into the desert from an airplane.
“I just thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” said Waul, a 28-year-old who works nights restocking a Gap clothing store.
The idea of setting a world record always appealed to Waul; he recalls that as a 7-year-old in Jamaica he pored over his father’s Guinness Book of World Records.
Creating a ball was easy. He got a few hair bands together. Then some larger bands. The ball grew to the size of a boulder, and his family took notice.
“When it started getting bigger, they knew I was pretty serious,” he said.
The ball eventually got its own Web site. It got too big to keep in the house, so he rolled it outside.
There have been a few casualties: at 400 pounds, it rolled over his hand and sprained it. It busted his big toe. Rubber bands breaking ripped two pairs of cargo pants and broke three pairs of sunglasses.*