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Non-Juggling Engineers Face Design Test

By Lloyd Timberlake London, England

Stockholm: Late last year, 46 engineers from companies in Sweden. Denmark and Norway spent three days here designing juggling props. The occasion was a course at the Swedish Association of Engineers and Architects (STF) in designing with new materials.

It was led by Goran Lundstrom, an expert on robots who is now designing a new cardiac pacemaker. More importantly, though, Lundstrom is a 41-year-old juggler with six months experience, and recent IJA signee.

So it was natural for Lundstrom to give the engineers a problem in designing new juggling props. He could be fairly certain that none had previous experience in the field. He showed them an old print of a man using a devil stick and gave them specifications on length and width.

The original designs returned to him included aluminum welded cones and the more basic wood and tape models. The best models, according to Lundstrom, had foam rubber balls on the ends. He was disappointed that no one used the latest high-friction materials for the sticks, or the latex-over-wood design that he is personally interested in.

For juggling clubs, he gave his students only the vague shape, plus specific weight and length. The best final design involved a new plastic used in the automotive industry which is light enough so that the clubs can be solid rather than hollow, soft enough for hands but hard enough to take drops and which can be brightly painted.

Lundstrom declines to give other specifics, because he hopes to produce these clubs himself.

Lundstrom and friends have started a company called Udda (Odd) Sports, to import unicycles, boomerangs, kites and now juggling props.

Other club propositions he received included plastic models and techniques for painting on them to produce brightly reflective and permanent color.

The balls section of the workshop was much more specific. Lundstrom, who met Dick Franco last summer, presented his engineers with a problem Franco faced in Italy. "A juggler has lost his balls and needs a new set, of a certain size and weight, in a week. How do you make them?"

The correct answer was to choose a certain kind of silicon rubber for the correct density and borrow a large steel ball-bearing to produce a perfectly round mold.

At the end of the course, Lundstrom brought in all the juggling props he could find and let the engineers throw them about. With another course already scheduled and the teen-agers Lundstrom coaches for fun, Sweden could soon be a juggling powerhouse.