How to Make Plinths for Juggling Balls

These are Peter Billam's suggestions for making plywood plinths for stacking either four or ten juggling balls in a neat tetrahedral pattern - like a pyramid with a triangular base.

This is your best way keeping your collection of juggling balls together on a shelf, or mantlepiece. It's also the ideal way of displaying juggling balls for sale if you have a shop, or a market stall, or of keeping them neat on your props table during a stage show.

The balls are displayed to best advantage, because the plinth is thin and doesn't get in the way. The stacked pyramid is fairly stable, and you can take a ball out of the bottom corner of the pile and the ones above it just drop down to take its place.

Plywood

Use wood about 6 mm in thickness. The exact thickness is shown on the pattern.

Patterns

Patterns are available (in Postscript and PDF) for stacking

• Four balls of 54 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Four balls of 61 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Four balls of 64 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Four balls of 74 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Four balls of 82 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 38 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 54 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 60 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 61 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 64 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 67 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 72 mm diameter (e.g. cricket balls), in Postscript or PDF.
• Ten balls of 74 mm diameter, in Postscript or PDF.

Save the pattern to disc (Shift-Click in Netscape) and print it out at will.

I find Postscript a very useful language, and write a lot of it:

• Muscript is my music typesetting program, which produces Postscript output
• I use Muscript to typeset my own musical compositions and arrangements
• All the logo gifs and background gifs for my web site are from Postscript originals.

Glueing

Glue the pattern to the plywood with a light glue (like a glue-stick for paper), and dry pressed flat.

Cutting Out

Cut round the outside of the outline either with a saw or with a Stanley knife and ruler.

Each hole is indicated by two concentric circles. The inner circle indicates the size of the hole on the underside of the plinth, so the wood is cut right through to the size of the inner concentric circle. The outer circle indicates the size of the hole on the top side of the plinth, so the wood is then cut away in a bevel to the size of the outer concentric circle. Cut the holes out as best you can. For me, this means with a Stanley knife, and it takes a while and could probably be safer. There are probably better methods.

Painting

Smooth off the cuts with sandpaper, and if you wish paint or varnish the plinth.

---

Back to www.pjb.com.au/jug, or to www.pjb.com.au, or to P J B Music, or to the Muscript Home Page, or to P J B Computing