35-year-old Zack Hample has devoted 32 years of his life to creating a giant ball made of elastic rubber bands. Which means he started making the ball when he was just three or four years old. There’s something odd about a three-year-old trying to make a rubber band ball, at an age when most kids are just learning to play with a ball.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, considering all the odd things Zack has done in his life. Just last year, we had featured him here on OC for a completely different achievement. Zack is the world’s best bawl hawk. As of last year, he had collected over 5,800 balls at all the games he attended.

Now Zack is in the news again, for his giant rubber band creation. It cost him about $1,500 over the years to put bands together to make a large ball that weighs over 250 pounds. A video shows him rolling the ball around in his room, talking about how he created it.

Photo: Zack Hample

Zack makes sure to put on his safety goggles before he gets to work, because the elastic breaks sometimes and he once got hit under the eye. He shows us the large bands that he makes use of, and also his masterpiece – the rubber band ball that almost reaches up to his waist.

In the video, Zack walks us through his two-part process of putting a new band on the ball. He stretches out the band first, to make it more pliable. Then he quickly snaps it on, and makes sure that it isn’t twisted. He also checks that two bands of the same color are never parallel to each other around the ball.

Photo: Zack Hample

He’s obviously an expert, but Zack’s ball isn’t a record-breaker. In fact, the record for the world’s largest rubber band ball is held by Joel Waul. His masterpiece is made of over 700,000 bands, measures seven feet tall, and weighs a whopping 4,000 kilograms.

But Zack isn’t really bothered about this. There are other records he’s working towards, and the rubber band ball project is just a hobby. “I’ve done a lot of baseball videos over the years, and I just thought, you know, I’ve never done one of the rubber band ball,” he says. “Hopefully, you found it interesting.”

Zack signs off the video by answering three questions he thinks most people want the answers to. “Number one: no, I’m not a virgin. Number two: yes, I have a job. Number three: no, I’m not going to take this up to the roof of my house and push it off.”

Source: Zack Hample