Introduction: How to Make a Polished Aluminum Foil Ball

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About: Hi, I'm Sam and I like to make things - check out some of my projects below. I worked for this site from 2014 - 2023 and have nothing but love for the Instructables community. Keep making great stuff!

Making polished aluminum foil balls has been a popular trend online recently, with loads of people doing it and sharing their results.

The idea started in Japan but has been spreading quickly, and more videos on the topic are popping up everyday. This is one of the earliest videos of the process for reference.

Now, I'm not normally one to jump on bandwagons . . but this just seemed like a fun idea to me, so I decided to try it out. It was a surprisingly meditative process!

I took an elementary approach to this and just used mallets, hammers, and some aluminum polish. For the time and effort, I was pleased with the results. There was no sanding involved whatsoever - only pounding, tapping, and polishing by hand.

I'll show you how I did this and share the tips I learned along the way. Thanks for reading!

Step 1: Materials

I used:

  • roll of standard aluminum foil, 285 square feet
  • various mallets and hammers
  • Mothers brand aluminum polish, and lots of rags
  • 20 lb barbell weight as a hard pounding surface
  • pounding stump (it's just a log I have in my shop for pounding on; it's quite handy)

Step 2: Unroll and Make a Ball

I unrolled the aluminum foil on the floor, and gathered and rolled the tail end into a ball shape. (As I rolled up the ball, the foil roll would bounce into the wall and started leaving marks, so I added some masking tape to prevent that.)

I did not take special care to pack the foil ball especially tight - I just kind of did this as quick as possible. The completed ball was a little bigger than a basketball.

Then I began by smashing the ball with my hands and body weight as much as possible, to begin compacting it.

Step 3: Start Pounding and Compacting

I started pounding on the aluminum foil ball with small dead-blow mallet on top of the 20 lb weight. You just need to do this on a hard surface, like a sturdy table for hard floor (doing this directly on carpet won't work very well).

I worked around the circumference of the ball making small blows to pack the aluminum foil tighter, until it was in a sort of marshmallow shape.

Then I rotated the shape and worked around the foil turning it into a kind of roundish pillow shape. The peaks of this pillow shape were then pounded in until it was back to ball shape, albeit smaller than before.

Step 4: Keep Going!

I switched to a slightly larger mallet and continued compacting the ball following the procedure outlined in the previous step.

You can just pound away randomly and continually knock down the high points, but I liked the somewhat repeatable order of operations: sphere > marshmallow > cube-ish pillow > back to sphere

Wearing some gloves is strongly recommended!

I was experimenting with different mallets, but you could just use the same hammer the whole time. The main thing is to not pound too hard and to avoid making overly deep indentations as you go.

Each blow should be enough to compact the foil a little bit, but you don't want to deform the material so much that you end up with an unfixably non-round shape.

At some point the ball will be compacting less and less noticeably, so it becomes a more random process of continually examining status and knocking down high points. It's a slow sculpting process, and a bit of a workout.

Step 5: Keep Going Some More

I took the ball out to my garage and set up my 20 lb weight on a waist-high log I use for pounding things. This was helpful.

I also switched to a small 2.5 lb hammer.

The smaller the ball gets, the heavier it seems. It's funny how your mind plays tricks on you like that.

Cracks will begin to appear in the ball as you continue to compact it. You just keep pounding around the ball uniformly, and the cracks will appear smaller and smaller.

Step 6: Almost Done

When you're nearing the end, you'll notice the foil not really compacting any more. Earlier on, each blow would make a hollow thud as the ball absorbed the blow and compacted a little.

But toward the end each pound will ring more solid, and the ball will bounce as the strike transfers cleanly through it.

I switched to a smaller hammer and began using it to tap out all the high spots and small irregularities. As I did this, the ball became more and more shiny.

I put the ball on a folded up rag and made repetitive TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP all around the ball. It sounded like there was woodpecker in the shop for a while, and I'm sure my neighbors were confused!

At this point the ball was 16 inches in circumference (about 40 cm), and looked pretty good to me. I figured it was a fine time to stop.

Step 7: Polishing

At this point, some people begin sanding their foil ball with increasingly finer grits of sandpaper, well up into the thousands.

I didn't see any reason to go to that trouble, considering that the ball was already pretty shiny.

Instead I polished the ball with a few rounds of Mothers Mag and Aluminum Polish. You rub it liberally on and then work it into the metal until it turns black, and then you buff it off with a series of progressively cleaner rags.

As you buff, initially the surfaces will appear dull and grey, but as you continue to buff (and switch to cleaner rags) you'll see the surface appear increasingly shinier. I repeated this process 4 or 5 times.

Step 8: All Done!

The surface of the ball is reflective but upon close inspection you can see all sorts of cracks and creases. It's really kind of fascinating to examine.

For about 4 hours of work and just a bit of polish, I turned a 7 dollar roll of aluminum foil into this shiny ball. Pretty cool I think.

Got any tips for me, or for other readers? Share them below!

If you make one, please share a photo and let me know about your methods, tools used, and how much time you spent. I'd love to see and hear about your results. Thanks again for reading.