A Reddit user spent a year gluing together a sphere of 42 thousand matches to burn it later

Often we come up with crazy and bold ideas. And in 99 percent of cases, they do not go further than the head. But not for a Reddit user under the nickname wallacemk, who, playing with matches (admit it, we all do that), decided to implement a crazy idea.

It all happened a year ago. "I spent 10 months and about 500 dollars (almost 29 thousand rubles) on this." Gluing them together was very painstaking and difficult work, but this did not stop the craftsman from the final stage of the project — burning.

"Once I was fooling around and playing with matches when I thought that the head of the matches was a little bigger than a straw. I was wondering what would happen if I started gluing them together and didn't stop. I imagined a sphere and decided to find out."

"When I started, I was wondering how many matches, at least approximately, I would need. I bought 300 pieces in boxes at a regular grocery store (they probably think I'm crazy). And in order to understand how my sphere will eventually look like, I used a program for three-dimensional modeling of Rhino."

"I used an angle of 0.82 degrees to find a circle that matches will create based on their shape. According to the program, if all the matches have the same shape (which is not the case), I would get a circle consisting of 439 matches with a diameter of 17.643 inches (44.81322 centimeters). The surface area of the sphere can be found using the equation 4πr2, and since r = 8.8215 inches, we get 977.405 square inches. Our matches occupy approximately 0.0156 square inches of this surface, so 977.405 square inches / 0.0156 square inches = 62,654 matches in an ideal world."

A quarter of a sphere.

"The bonding process has begun. The photo was taken in a moment of optimism and excitement. My theory worked, and my craft finally began to take shape."

Here the craftsman has already realized how much effort and time it will actually take him.

"It wasn't a perfect circle, of course, but it still looks great."

"I saved all the empty boxes to understand how much it took in the end. It turned out exactly 140 boxes. If there were really 300 matches in each box, then it was equal to 42 thousand matches. And this is significantly different from my estimate of 62,654. Many factors could contribute to this: an inaccurate number of matches in each box, perhaps I did not create an ideal sphere (in fact, it is), and maybe the matches were all of different sizes (it is). Nevertheless, 20 thousand is too much for the margin of error."

"And that's what we get. It turned out that the green matches are not quite green. All this took me 10 months. But it was worth it."

It has to be done.