I remember watching a Mythbusters eppisode titled: "You can't polish sh|t", where they found out the myth was busted by the ancient Japanese artform of Dorodango. I stumbled across it again the other day on the tube and thought I'd give it a go. I thought I'd really challenge it and use straight dirt with pebbles and grass all through it.
Classifying it all down to a fly-screen mesh size, we wet it and started sloppong balls together. Ill have to say it was not as easy as I thought. The instructions say to add dry dirt, but when I did this I found it caused cracks..which then the dirt got into, forcing the crack to not be healed. So I made anither rough ball and went for a detect. When I returned a few hours later the ball had lost a bit of moisture and was much easier to then smooth and add fine dirt to it without cracking. I was also lazy and didn't put the balls in a bag in the sun to loose moisture, or use the fridge.
A rough lump of ball was then in my hands to which I used a small glass container ( from an old house site
) to start shaping the ball into symmetry. This happened over the remainder of the afternoon till midnight. As it gets smoother and more spherical, the bottle started to grib and squeek, just like cabbing or faceting a rock. Rubbing my ball. By 9pm the shape was really starting to get close to round, and now its near perfect sphere and up to polishing stage.
The aim is to get it as glossy or reflective and spherical as possible.
Has anyone else had a go at Dorodango?
What you need:
Dirt, clay, excrement
Water
-optional:
something like a bottle or pipe that's round to shape the ball
Cerium or tin oxide to polish
P.S; a bit off subject to the topic, but this is very similar to how tgey turn gemstones into spheres as well. They just rotate the ball held in cups or pipes with either diamond tips or by adding abraisives.
Classifying it all down to a fly-screen mesh size, we wet it and started sloppong balls together. Ill have to say it was not as easy as I thought. The instructions say to add dry dirt, but when I did this I found it caused cracks..which then the dirt got into, forcing the crack to not be healed. So I made anither rough ball and went for a detect. When I returned a few hours later the ball had lost a bit of moisture and was much easier to then smooth and add fine dirt to it without cracking. I was also lazy and didn't put the balls in a bag in the sun to loose moisture, or use the fridge.
A rough lump of ball was then in my hands to which I used a small glass container ( from an old house site
) to start shaping the ball into symmetry. This happened over the remainder of the afternoon till midnight. As it gets smoother and more spherical, the bottle started to grib and squeek, just like cabbing or faceting a rock. Rubbing my ball. By 9pm the shape was really starting to get close to round, and now its near perfect sphere and up to polishing stage.The aim is to get it as glossy or reflective and spherical as possible.
Has anyone else had a go at Dorodango?
What you need:
Dirt, clay, excrement
Water
-optional:
something like a bottle or pipe that's round to shape the ball
Cerium or tin oxide to polish
P.S; a bit off subject to the topic, but this is very similar to how tgey turn gemstones into spheres as well. They just rotate the ball held in cups or pipes with either diamond tips or by adding abraisives.
