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Toys Entertainment

Make Your Own Cluster Balloon 243

Posted by michael from the we-disclaim-all-responsibility dept.
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "'Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?' John Ninomiya does exactly that using 50-150 four-seven foot diameter balloons filled with helium ... and sealed with tape (duct?) and cable ties. Folks may recall the lawn chair man who floated up to 16,000 feet, but John takes this to a whole new level and his site has some wild pictures ... and includes the comment 'Kids, don't try this at home!'"
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Make Your Own Cluster Balloon More

Make Your Own Cluster Balloon

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  • The inevitable question... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:33PM (#10993681) Homepage
    If you were a sixth century Scandinavian warrior out to kill a Grendel, and providence provided you with one of these clusters, what would you call it?

  • four-seven (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ryanmfw ( 774163 )
    50-150 four-seven foot diameter balloons

    What kind of measurement is that? The ambiguous measure. The new way to skimp out on actually *editing* articles.

    Unless, of course, they're just different sized ballons, and I'm just being a pedant. Silly me.

  • Mary Poppin's (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kevin Mitnick ( 324809 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:35PM (#10993696) Homepage Journal
    Call me when we have an umbrella that lets you fly through the clouds
  • He eventually committed suicide, though it's unclear if it had anything to do with the amount of ridicule he received as a result of the lawnchair incident. All he needed to do was to make it look like he flew away on purpose, and nobody would be any wiser. Kind of like the guy in this article. :)

  • More information... (Score:5, Informative)

    by WalterGR ( 106787 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:37PM (#10993706) Homepage

    The lawn-chair man sounded like a hoax to me, but snopes.com [snopes.com] (which we all know is the final word in urban legends) claims [snopes.com] it's true!

    My favorite part:

    As Larry and his lawnchair drifted into the approach path to Long Beach Municipal Airport, perplexed pilots from two passing Delta and TWA airliners alerted air traffic controllers about what appeared to be an unprotected man floating through the sky in a chair.

    • So he messed with air traffic. That's nothing. I heard about a kid who started a nuclear war with fewer than 100 red balloons.
    • It's better than just true, it's a true story that's been made into a movie [imdb.com].

  • From the pictures... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kai5263499 ( 751741 ) * <kai@@@werxltd...com> on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:38PM (#10993714) Homepage
    that looks like a prime position for a serious wedgie...

  • Yay! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anubis333 ( 103791 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:38PM (#10993715) Homepage
    Sounds like we will have some new Darwin Award entries this year!
    • Actually the darwin awards has one of the best writeups on Lawnchair Larry [darwinawards.com], unfortunately they have added some dumb cartoons recently, but it has more info than the summary article and some good real pictures.
  • Check out Danny Deckchair. Its relativly new, and recieved decent reviews.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/ [imdb.com]

  • Mythbusters on helium balloons... (Score:3, Informative)

    by outofservice ( 79233 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:41PM (#10993738)
    The Mythbusters (Discovery Channel) did a segment on what it takes to get liftoff from helium balloons.

    From http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/epis ode/episode_06.html:

    So, this guy named Larry Walters attached something like 45 weather balloons to this lawn chair. One of the tethers broke on the unemployed truck driver's little invention, shooting him straight up into the air. Apparently he sailed to 16,000 feet, where he was spotted by airline pilots, eventually closing LAX airport. He was finally rescued by a helicopter after he floated out to sea. Is this popular Internet legend full of hot air? Will Jamie and Adam close LAX?


    They tried doing this, and let's just say it took a LOT of balloons to get a young girl even neutrally buoyant.
    • Well, it's not a 'popular internet legend' it just became one.

      It happened in the eighties, somewhere around 97 it started to go around the internet with numerous facts changed, including ""A helicopter after he floated out to sea"

      He actually got tangled in powerlines.

      Don't these 'mythbusters' do their freaking homework? god

    • Re:Mythbusters on helium balloons... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They tried doing this, and let's just say it took a LOT of balloons to get a young girl even neutrally buoyant.

      You're thinking of the one where the Mythbuster assistants filled regular helium party balloons to lift a child up. That was of a myth of a child being lifted up by a carnival balloon seller handing the child his whole lot, which did take several thousand to lift her.

      The one they did with weather balloons, which are MUCH larger, took substantially less to lift Jamie. 55 to be exact [adamsavage.com].
    • Indeed, it took them 3000+ baloons to levitate the little girl. Those ballons, hoever were of the average carnival variety. Also, at the time, they were testing the myth that a small child could be carried away by a large bouquet of carnival balloons, a la Mr. Bean.

      The Mysthbusters did a separate segment on "Lawnchair Lary" using large weather ballons. They also tested whether or not a pellet gun could be used to burst ballons to reduce altitude (as reported in the story). I know that they got the lawnchai
    • They tried doing this, and let's just say it took a LOT of balloons to get a young girl even neutrally buoyant.

      But Pamela Sue Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith only needed four between them for a heckuva lot more buoyancy! (and if I was between them, I sure wouldn't be neutrally buoyant).

  • We stopped believing in Magic, when we were 5,6,7, or even 8. But this is amazinglgy great, and news worthy, if the site did not as of yet get slashdotted the QT slide show is kick ass and well made. I wish I could do this. PS be glad these baloons are not made of hydrogen. I wisth the news monoply broadcased this information. Rock On Balkoon Man ..

  • so far as oversized helium balloons go.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:46PM (#10993779) Homepage Journal
    I wondered in my life- more than once, if you only wanted to SLOW DOWN someone jumping off a building, say due to a flaming jet being inbetween you and the ground floor.

    how much helium/how large of a tank/baloon to produce enough lift and wind resistance to lower you to the ground with, at best, a broken leg... something between a hot air baloon and a $2.00 mylar in size, and only created to drop you at survivable impact speeds....

    • Cool idea.

      Of course the footage from the towers would have been funny instead of horrifying (people jumping to their deaths).

  • Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rorschach1 ( 174480 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:50PM (#10993799) Homepage
    Let's see, in my bedroom and garage, I've got on hand:

    * Paraglider harness
    * Reserve parachute
    * Helium
    * Balloons
    * Duct tape
    * Oxygen cylinders and masks
    * Warm clothes
    * Flight helmet
    * GPS
    * Handheld radio
    * BB gun

    And here I was wondering what to do with my weekend.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Excellent! I, too, have an open weekend. Perhaps we could meet up? In my garage and bedroom I have:

      * A large first-aid kit.
    • What part of the world are you from? If you are from the southern U.S., let me know when you are going to attempt this. I shall sit in my front yard with popcorn. ;-)
      • Central California. And I actually have seriously considered doing this, but the main constraint is the cost of helium. I've got maybe 200 cu ft on hand, enough to lift about 10 pounds. And that cost me about $60.

        Some day, maybe. Every time I drive by the helium tankers at work I can't help thinking about it. The Mojave desert is only a few hours away, and would make a nice launch site - assuming you coordinated with Edwards AFB first.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Epistax ( 544591 )
      And now you know! Give out a bunch of helium-filled balloons to little kids in the big city. Get atop the highest building in the area. You'll need to use ogygen tanks for air up there and the warm clothes will come in handy. Now shoot the little kids' ballons from the top of the building. Use the radio to tell when the police are coming. Wear a flight helmet so the police can't identify you. Once they are almost on you, jump off the building utilizing a hybrid paraglider/parachute device (duct tape r
    • The only thing that scares me is that you didn't specify where the duct tape was: the garage... or the bedroom?

  • Three words (Score:2, Informative)

    by Thagg ( 9904 )
    Oh my god!

    This is the most magical thing I have seen in quite some time.

  • Can not go too high (Score:5, Interesting)

    by asadodetira ( 664509 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:52PM (#10993811) Homepage
    I remember in a fluid dynamic course we did some balloon calculations, and one conclusion was that baloons are unstable, as they go up, the pressure decreases, so the gas keeps expanding until it bursts. I guess this might be different with a real materials, I don't recall how you model the elastic membrane stuff.
    • I think your calculations were wrong. I remember the original event, it was all over the TV news. Also, sounding baloons are launched routinely. They rise until their expansion causes their weight to equal that of the air that they displace. They then tend to hover at that altitude until the helium leaks out.

    • Re:Can not go too high (Score:4, Informative)

      by windows ( 452268 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @02:08AM (#10994858)
      They're only flying as high as about 20,000 feet at the most. The pressure up there is about 500 mb. Sea level pressure is approximately 1000 mb. Consider an experiment at the surface where we inflate a balloon in a 1000 mb environment. We then keep the same temperature, but drop the pressure to 500 mb. That means for the balloon to maintain equal pressure with its surroundings, it must double in volume. That means, since volume is a three dimensional quantity that the diameter must increase by the cube root of 2. The diameter is only 1.26 times what it was before. Even at 125 mb, the balloon would only be twice its previous size.

      The 300 mb level in the atmosphere is around 32,000 feet. That's higher than the peak of Mt. Everest. Unless you brought oxygen tanks along, you would almost certainly be unconscious at that pressure. And yet in our surface experiement, at 300 mb, the balloon would only have a diameter of 1.49 times its diameter at 1000 mb.

      And if your balloon is still intact at 300 mb and you're still conscious, you'd have more to worry about than your balloon bursting. You're likely to encounter some pretty strong winds at that altitude which might make steering a bit of a challenge.

      But unless you fill your balloon almost completely full at the surface, you'd likely be unconscious before you'd see your balloon burst.

  • Oh My... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dallask ( 320655 ) <codeninja.gmail@com> on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:55PM (#10993829) Homepage
    This is going to get at least ONE slashdotter killed....

    Great photos though.
    • > This is going to get at least ONE slashdotter killed....
      >
      >Great photos though.

      What, the photos on the site, or the photos and video our soon-to-be-deceased Slashdotter will be streaming back to his webserver as he falls screaming to his death, practically guaranteeing a simultaneous appearance on both Slashdot and Fark.

      Hmm, a late-model ruggedized laptop equipped with wireless and a dozen pringles cans to guarantee that at least one Starbucks is at range after the crash... it'll survive th

  • Did anybody else see this and immediately think of Balloon Kid for Game Boy [jk0.org]?

  • slingshot!!! >:)

  • A storm comes up. You go out of control, spinning wildly above orchards, ponds, villages.

    Picket fences. Busy highways. Powerlines.

    You wonder "Was I really that stupid?" You fall.

  • Helium (Score:2, Funny)

    by zoeith ( 785087 )
    There is only so much Helium around... a very valuable resource. Please use hydrogen instead if you decide to try this at home.
    • Hm...the volume of the sun is something like 1,000,000 earths [nasa.gov] and the sun is composed of about 27% helium by mass [gsu.edu], so it seems to me that there's about 270,000 Earth-fulls of helium waiting to be picked up.

      Now:
      1. Drive Earth over to the sun
      2. Collect helium
      3. PROFIT!!!!

      Oh...wait...there's the little matter of the temperature being millions of degrees... :-(
    • Can't you produce helium in the lab? If not, from where do we get helium that is used in industry, etc.?

      • Re:Helium (Score:3, Informative)

        by Big Bob the Finder ( 714285 )
        Helium is produced as a function of radioactive decay in the lab (or, in larger quantities, in nuclear reactors). The quantities are not commercially viable.

        Commercial quantities of helium come out of the ground in Texas. [dst.tx.us] People think the Strategic Helium Reserve [agiweb.org] was such a big joke. Except for the fact that without helium, we can't make computer chips, can't do inert gas welding, can't do a lot of science and (most important) can't make squeaky voices at kid's parties. So, the government has decided i

  • Safety (Score:3, Informative)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @11:00PM (#10994155) Journal
    From the Site:
    Latex balloon clusters have been flown as high as 20,000 feet; however, for a recreational flight, a maximum altitude of 3,000 - 5,000 feet is more common.

    From a BASE Jump site:
    The safety margin in a normal free fall exercise is 800 metres (~2600 feet), the minimum height at which a jumper may deploy the chute safely

    So basically if something farks up, your really farked.
    • Every balloon would have to pop or come detached in order for the you to count as "free fall". You'd presumably attach the balloons to several different points, so that even if half of the balloons fail, you only accelerate at half gravity. You have a lot more time before descent, so you can safely use a parachute.

      Although you may not even need to; the balloons are already allowing you to go pretty slowly. If half the balloons fell off, you'd land at about 70% the speed you would if you were in freefall fr

    • Re:Safety (Score:3, Informative)

      by CvD ( 94050 )
      Minimum exit height for skydiving is around 2500 feet, but this is not recommended. We regularly jump from 3500 feet. No problem there, you just don't get much freefall time (couple seconds). I'm not sure how fast a paragliding reserve opens, but with regular chutes you need at most a couple hundred feet to open a parachute if you're doing a 'hop & pop' where you open your chute right after leaving the plane. This would the case as well, where the pilot of the cluster would find himself descending too f

    • Re:Safety (Score:3, Informative)

      by pcraven ( 191172 )
      I'm a balloon pilot, and get questions like this a lot. Balloons don't fail at altitude. If you have a problem, it is because you hit power lines, a tower, etc. 99% of problems with balloons occur within 100 feet of the ground.

      Also, maximum descent for a hot air balloon is the same as a military parachute. So using a parachute would be kind of pointless.

      I only know of one cases of balloons failing at altitude. It was a mid-air collision between balloons. Even then, the pilot survived. A streamering balloo
  • ...is just how many people all over the US this guy has suckered into spending the wee hours of the morning inflating balloons, just for him alone to get his kicks. He must be a really smooth talker.

  • Warballooning? (Score:3, Funny)

    by kinema ( 630983 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @11:40PM (#10994347)
    We've seen wardriving, warflying, warboating I think the obvious next step is warballooning.

  • Try this AT HOME! (Score:3, Funny)

    by InfiniteWisdom ( 530090 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @12:04AM (#10994433) Homepage
    Kids, don't try this at home
    On the contrary, if you want to try this, do it at home... that way you won't find yourself floating at 16,000 feet unless you have an exceptionally weak roof.
  • I read somewhere that 10% or less of lightening actually strikes the ground; most is within clouds itself.

    Aircraft have metal skins, so I think the passengers in them are protected from such strikes.

    Does this guy have any protection besides not going out on an overcase day? I imagine he would be more conductive than moist air, so his body would be in preferred over air as the path of a nearby lightening bolt. I guess one mitigation is if he wore some sore of conductive clothing.
  • It was made from the feathers of fortyleven geese.

    50-150, 4-7, there is a connection here I think, but I don't have enough toes to count on and figure this out..."

  • Official "Lawn Chair Pilot" site (Score:5, Informative)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @01:02AM (#10994638) Journal
    Go here [markbarry.com] to get the full skinny on the REAL lawn chair pilot, complete with streaming audio, pictures, maps, the works.

    It was on Art Bell a few years ago....
  • "Special hoses and manifolds are used to inflate the balloons to the desired size, based on the volume of the helium tanks."

    So, if you ever ride on one of these things--make sure you ask to fill with the sized-huge tanks and not the handhelds, or you're in for a new world of hurt.

    Or maybe you should just see if they'll throw the entire tank in there. ;)

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