Day
Two
Try out our balloon near to sunrise but still no joy.
We decide that the round structure is a little more
stable than the long sausage and so decide to make up
a much larger spherical balloon using the light bags
– about 4-5m in diameter.
The large spherical structure is composed of 12 pentagons
cut-out from the bags and sticky-taped together to make
up a sort of football shape. The idea was to make up
the pentagons and then add them together to form two
bowl shaped structures having six pentagons each, and
then finally to fit these together to form the spherical
structure. This seemed more logical as it is very easy
to get lost in all the plastic sheet that ends up being
on the ground! We started out really well and made good
progress but when we had made up the two bowl shapes
the problems began.
Kathy and I realised that the two halves needed to
be joined together in the correct place, we couldn’t
simply tape them together at any point and hope they
would come together okay. So we thought about it and
went ahead … and .. somehow got it wrong!
What should have been a nice round structure when filled
with air turned into a horrible square-ish thing with
knobbly bits! We carefully cut the two halves apart
but got lost in the process and ended up having to take
each pentagon apart and tape them up again. In the process
our pentagons lost shape and it took ages to re-assemble
the two halves. Then after carefully thinking about
how they should go together we joined them up …
only to find that once more we got it wrong!
We simply did not have the time to re-build the thing
again and so we had to make do with a slightly square
round balloon with tuffty bits like ears – in
fact we called it ‘big ears’.
Kathy makes up a payload holder and we string it to
the balloon. We are both exhausted having put everything
into getting this dam design working. We are running
out of time to do any changes and so we have to go with
what we have got.
No more time left today and we only have tomorrow morning
left for a Sun rise to test it out!
| 
