It's over six and a half feet tall, 25 feet in circumference, weighs nearly 10,000 pounds, and everybody says it stinks. No, we're not talking about Kanye West's ego, we're talking about Joel Waul's rubber band ball.
The Lauderhill 28-year-old has been crafting the ball for the past six years, but today he'll watch it roll down the road when the people at Ripley's Believe It or Not! haul it up to Orlando where it will be put on display for all the world to see.
It seems fitting that Ripleys will display the ball, since Waul said they were the inspiration for him beginning it in the first place. Waul said he became inspired while watching a Ripley's TV show in 2004 in which a rubber band ball was dropped from an airplane.
"I just thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen," said Waul, who works at the Gap, stocking shelves at night.
What started with a few small rubberbands kept growing and growing to the point where it now uses over 720,000 rubber bands. By 2008, the people at the Guinness Book of World Records gave it the title of world's largest rubber band ball.
By that point, the ball was taking up so much space and smelled so bad, the ball had to be moved out of Waul's home and kept under a tarp in his driveway.
"That's his masterpiece," said Waul's neighbor Andre Gregg. "I'm just amazed at how he did it."
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To keep adding to the size of the ball, Waul asked companies that make giant rubber bands to donate to his cause.
This afternoon, workers from Ripley's will use a crane to hoist the ball onto the back of a flatbed truck and haul it away.
"We already have the largest string and barbed wire balls," said Edward Meyer, with Ripley's. "This is now my holy trinity, I guess."
