Building a Balloon in 22 Days

It seems that a great fabric crisis of 2006 has been averted. As a result of a fair bit of persuasion and persistence, the fabric vendor (Noah Lamport) says they’ll ship replacement fabric via overnight freight at their cost as well as pay for ground freight return of the wrong stuff. We’ll see tomorrow if they follow through.

In addition to leaning on the fabric folks, Kevin spent much of his day as purchasing manager. The load tape has now been ordered (from Bally Ribbon Mills) and lots of other component choices have been made. Kevin went so far as to order top grade, shuttle loomed webbing for the load tape. Most folks don’t even bother with the difference between shuttle loomed and needle loomed load tapes. But Kevin said he’d promised his Mother that he wouldn’t cut corners. So he got the good stuff.

As for the sewing, that’s coming along as well. Kevin was up late into yesterday night and started work at 11 or so this morning. At this point, nearly all of the panels 3,4,5 have been sewn together.

This evening we cut panel #2 which is the bottom-most nylon panel and the last one made of the green fabric. It’s a “half height” panel that will be joined with a half height panel 1 made of Nomex for the mouth of the balloon.

Half height panels are trickier to lay out since the usual system doesn’t work. There’s a fair bit of head-scratching and improvisational measurement technique involved. Kevin’s first attempt at cutting panel #2 ended in a disgrace that could lead to deep chagrin were his High School geometry teacher ever to learn of it.

Fortunately on the second attempt, Kevin and I played geometry back-and-forth with lots of double-checking. There were at least three serious errors made by one or the other of us during the layout that were (fortunately) caught in time. The strain of these mental gymnastics even lead us to butt heads (a rare event for two such ardently affable persons as ourselves.) Nonetheless, in the end, we managed (or at least we think we managed) to cut the panel out correctly. (I’ll believe it only when the sewing’s done.)

Although, even with our focused attention, we managed to cut out 14 panels rather than the required 12. Better two extra than two short.

This evening I left Kevin making registration marks along the edge of the panel.

With luck, somewhere between California and Massachusetts there is a roll of sky blue fabric winging it’s way Eastward. If so, we’ll be cuttin’ blue in earnest tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.