Awesome Globes

We’ve been enjoying North of the Border’s creative sculptures and sassy narration for a while now. Adam’s polymer clay and resin sculpt imagines a giant space monster that has gotten its tentacles around Earth and is ready to gulp us all down like a giant jawbreaker covered with ants.

Carpenter Frank Howarth has made several wooden spheres in the past. This time he painstakingly assembled a globe with a funky mosaic pattern made from scrap wood pieces. It’s not as successful as his traditional globe design, but the build process was still quite interesting to watch.

This 707-piece wooden globe model has a motor-drive mechanism that keeps it spinning. In addition to the rotating globe, a tiny, magnetic ship sails around its base to commemorate Magellan’s journey around the Earth. Each of its 81 continental puzzle pieces has pinholes so you can mark cities you’ve visited.

Woodworker Frank Howarth keeps getting requests to create a globe of the Earth. He started with 3D modeling software to project the map onto triangle shapes, then cut each of them and assembled them into a faceted sphere before turning the whole works on a lathe. It took lots of trial and error, but the finished piece is amazing.

Product designer and engineer Jude Pullen created this internet-connected globe that doubles as an international radio tuner. By rotating it to a location beneath its pointer, you can listen to streaming audio from over 2,000 stations around the world. Find the build guide on Instructables and read more on DesignSpark.

Most cheap globes are made by forming cardboard or plastic around a mold. Maker SKM shows how he built his own cardboard globe from scratch by building a spherical skeleton, then wrapping the structure in triangular slices of paper. More impressive is the 3-axis rotating stand, built primarily from popsicle sticks formed into rings.

The Slow Mo Guys co-host Gavin Free was inspired by the macro water droplet photography of Markus Reugels, and decided to try and replicate the effect by capturing a refracted map of the Earth onto a droplet in front of his high-speed camera. It took some fiddling to get the focus right, but he eventually got it sorted.

Artist and woodturner Andy Phillip takes us through the complicated and time-consuming process of gradually refining a hunk of birch tree trunk into a beautiful 7″ globe, complete with the continents, and iridescent blue oceans made from epoxy resin. This isn’t the first time Andy’s made something cool and spherical.

Spalding’s mashup of globe and basketball is perfect for your next game of Around the World. It’s an official, regulation-sized rubber ball, and would look great sitting in your living room on a globe stand when not in use. Exclusively available from Urban Outfitters.

Acme Globes’ sweet spherical maps roll smoothly in any direction on ball bearings integrated in a handmade cork or birch base. Magnets at the poles allow it to spin on its axis like a regular globe too. Each 14.75″ globe features a map of the stars on the inside, and Kickstarter backers get a bonus 4″ moon globe.

Techmoan shows off a new version of MOVA’s solar-powered spinning globe – and this one is even niftier than the original, as its globe floats magically inside of a 5″ cube. If you don’t want to spend so much, consider their spherical standard map and planet models.

A campy old film from British Pathé that shows how globes used to be handmade using papier mache, plaster, paper cutting, and painting. While most of today’s globes are mass-produced from plastic, there are still a handful of globemakers who still make them this way.