Cool, that reminds me of the Horns of Isis.
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Accounting for the unfortunate camera movement, it seems that the horizontal weld joints do not change diametrically after the explosion. (I know you can guess how I pulled that off the screen.) Given that, your guess re “structural members” sounds right… with those members (thick rings?) located along the weld joints, limiting/controlling for the desired final shape.
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Well, we can still see the lines, but looking at the edge to see the profile of the sphere, it does look perfectly curved / spherical.
[quote=“anothernewbbaccount, post:23, topic:187268, full:true”]
… i.e., do not change diametrically. The joints will always be there. Depending on what that sphere is intended for, larger ports to be later worked in will allow removal of any goodies needed for the forming process to take place.
Thanks for that information… have always wandered how to get balls of steal 
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Not sure I grok your use of that term in this context. Surely they must change diametrically if they move from straight lines to curves.
(Sadly, I must shut down for the night, now.)
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The axles for the IFA W 50 were made using explosive forming.
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Mandatory
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I was living out in a cabin on a friends farm years ago & my solid waste disposal method was grabbing a crunched, dented & rusty trash can someone was getting rid of off the side of the road & putting it up on 2 cinder blocks & just burning the trash. One day I had a pretty good fire going & tossed a near empty can of wd-40 in the barrel & ran off & watched to see what happened. The can heated quickly, split open & the was a huge explosion & fireball, & all the dents in the trash can were knocked out to nearly new condition.
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SciHUUUUUUUUUUBBBBBBBB!!!
But this is really cool. Also, congrats to the welders. An error in calculation of explosives, or shoddiness of any weld, and you have a bomb, not a sphere.
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What’s a “trail”? I don’t know artillery stuff.
The bit that sticks out the back and rests on the ground.
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My stepfather did something a little like this by accident.
He’d already been welding professionally for decades when this happened, but he’s not a boilermaker.
Anyway, he and my mom have a cottage that was built long before anyone had any idea of running water in the place. When the municipality started running non-potable water around for bathing, there wasn’t room for normal hot water tank anywhere. So he bought the heating equipment separately, welded up his own tank from stainless steel and stuck it under the cottage. When the day came to try it out, he turned it on, let the water flow in, and we waited. After a while, there was a strange, sudden noise of wrenching metal from under the floor.
After a short, panicked interval, he found that the rectangular tank he’d built had bowed out on all six sides so that it was now semi-rounded, but all the welds were intact. I was just a kid at the time, but I think what happened was he’d allowed the tank to fill completely with cold water which, once heated, needed a lot more room and had nowhere to go… Probably lucky it didn’t destroy some of the associated plumbing.
I think the place still has that hot water tank (after ~35 years).
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This is not new. I remember learning about explosive forming in the 1970’s. But I had never seen a video before now. Thanks: it’s nice to see the wonderful things making a comeback, now that you-know-who no longer tops the bill.
In the GDR it was roughly
– 10% : come up with brilliant idea
– 20% : figure out how to turn brilliant idea into practical solution
– 70% : figure out how to sell the Zentralkommittee on it
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I’d just like to say that the “video making the rounds” tag is a particularly clever choice for this post.
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Someone call the SlowMo guys; I really want to see this at 10,000 frames per second.
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