Paper for globe gores

[mewo2]

Hi folks,

I've been dabbling around with trying to make a globe, with paper gores on a sphere. However I'm having trouble finding a paper which will stretch appropriately, and not crinkle at the edges between gores - does anyone have any experience with this? What kind of paper do the pros use?

[Redrobes]

I dont know the answer to your question but I do know that if you use a lot of gores then you wont need so much stretching so maybe just up the number of them.

[waldronate]

It sounds like you're going to mark onto the output using a printer (or maybe by hand) and then use that to make a globe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeDA3qjTUkg shows how Replogle (a maker of the inexpensive globes often found in homes and elementary schools) makes globes from maps printed a basic paper and then laminated onto cardboard and assembled using heated molds. Note the kind of projection that they use: it's a rosette of gores that neatly avoids the problem of getting the very thin pointy bits at the poles. http://www.brighthubeducation.com/he...for-a-project/ shows an example of building a globe directly using cheap paper rather than laminating it first (note the poor quality). Again, they are using a rosette (with glue tabs) to get a good result.

As redrobes points out, using more pieces will let you get less distortion.

The last time that I made a globe, I noticed that I got less distortion from cheaper paper because it tended to stretch more when wet. Making the gores wider than I needed helped, because the edges were the parts that tended to have the most problems staying down and I could arbitrarily razor through the parts that were persistently bad at staying down, which gave me a very small error that would get covered by the next gore. I have a very low tolerance for frustration, so I would tend to put down a gore, let it dry, trim the overlapped edge, put down the next gore, let it dry, trim the overlap, and so on. If I recall correctly, I didn't get particularly good results, but it was good enough for the person who wanted it. I was also lazy and just started from a thriftstore globe (often less than $5) that I sanded and primed. The low-quality starting material may have also influenced the quality of my results.