In general, this is a difficult problem to solve. The best solutions to this
problem seem to come from ball manufacturers. Baseballs only use two pieces
of leather, although the resulting seam is pretty complicated. The ends wrap
around, so it would either take multiple forming operations or some
interesting tooling.
I have seen tip shapers for pool cues that looks like a hemisphere with a
large lip.
http://store5.yimg.com/I/welovepool-inc_1766_5035054
You could probably get tooling to stamp a shape like that and then trim the
edge.
No matter how you make it, you would need tooling to hold the pieces while
they are being soldered. Even so, it would be difficult to get a good seam.
I worked my way through college as a silversmith, and I thought that shapes
like spheres, etc., were available through the wholesale jewelry supply
houses.
Loren Jahraus
Autodesk Inventor Workflow Team
"jmartzig" wrote in message
news:f19b332.1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> ha ha - no. i know it sounds pretty funny. but a customer of ours (a
jeweler) is looking for ways to make a piece of jewelery cheaper. a way to
do this (he thinks) would for us to be able to lay out a flat pattern of a
sphere, and have it welded about all seams. i thought i could do it in
halves, but that dog wasn't hunting either. i thought it may be
un-producible in inventor. i could probably get close using regular ol'
autocad, using a that flat pattern of the earth like i mentioned above. -Joe