Making a wooden ball that is as precise as possible with a precisely specified diameter and a high surface quality in a reasonable amount of time is one of the supreme disciplines of wood turning and requires practice and experience. Anyone who has finally trained their dexterity and a sense of proportion and/or even invested in a ball turning device may then realize with disillusionment that they can't do much with wooden balls! Spannagel already warned in 1940 in his wood turning work against the use of the spherical shape as a design element on turned objects:
"We must warn urgently against the use of the ball, because in its purely round shape it cannot be incorporated into the design of wood turners' shapes. What is different, of course, if it appears as an independent ball, e.g. as a cue ball, or if it lined up to form a chain or used by the sculptor to make a carved rod. But you can never form an impressive column from balls lined up one on top of the other. It is particularly ugly when there are sharp cones stuck in a ball or a rod brutally grows out of a large ball. Either way said once and for all that balls cannot be feet, because a ball rolls, it does not support and it does not stop!"
Even if the possible applications and therefore the "market" for hand-turned wooden balls is not very large, practicing manual production methods is worth it because of the fun factor that the determined overcoming of obstacles offers and because of the joy of a successful job in the end!
In order to answer the question of whether it would be “worth it” for me to purchase a commercially available ball turning device, I started a “preliminary test” and put together a makeshift ball device using parts of my DBF-Gerätes . A Wiedemann unscrewing hook used as a cutting steel ensures cutting chip removal despite the simplest construction despite the horizontally attached steel holder. The pile of shavings quickly grew to the point where I had to stop and clean up! I count the many balls with excitement! I'm shocked to see how much my supply of perfectly dried wood for turning has shrunk in such a short time! Before I disassemble the device into its individual parts, I document my construction with a few photos. This will make it child's play to set it up again when I turn a bowling game with my grandchildren at some point!