--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 23:02:59 -0700
From: "Virginia R. Hetrick" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Making globes
Sender: "Virginia R. Hetrick" <[log in to unmask]>



Susan wants to know about making a globe.

I have no idea how the official folks do it but one of the things I did
in 7th grade was to make a paper mache globe so I could make it bumpy
where the mountains were.  Unfortunately, I never figured out how to
make the deeps until I was taking cartography some years later.  ;-)

I blew up a playground ball that was being discarded because they
couldn't patch it any more and slathered some Vaseline on it so that the
paper wouldn't stick to it.  Then, I made the gores out of butcher paper
(remember that?!) and traced the land shapes onto them using a gridded
copying technique (I remember the hassles of finding my first 1 cm graph
paper!).

The hardest part was to have a little bit of extra paper on one side of
the gore (except for the first (extra on both sides) and last (no extra
on either side)).  I sort of thought of the joints as seams. When I laid
the gores onto the ball, the worst problem was that everything was
slippery.  So, what I wound up doing was making two almost hemispheres
and then joining them after they hardened up.  That way, I could let the
ball rest on the red Pyrex mixing bowl until the paper mache hardened
up.

After each hemisphere hardened, I put the mountains on it (they didn't
join properly when I joined the hemispheres so I had a few extra miles
of mountains!

I got an A on the project from Mrs. Baugh.  I did the project instead of
American history -- even then I was getting bored with the Civil War --
never did get it until I saw the Andersonville cemetery while I was in
Atlanta working on my disseration.

While I was teaching at UF and the CAM software and database were the up
and coming cartographic thing, I remember working out a program to draw
the gores on a plotter, but I have no idea where it is now.  As I
recall, I wound up using the CGS Map Projections book to work out the
equations for the program.

HTH.

vh
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