Brass Balls Kit

As Seen In MAKE magazine vol. 21, p. 138

What gift are you going to give to your bud? A bottle of wine? Get a room! A book? Add it to the pile. You want something good, something they’ll remember, you’ll get him these solid brass balls of solid brass. Yes, I said it twice.

You don’t need a semiotician to know that these bad boys are full of meaning. As a token of esteem, they have a purity that makes other gift attempts look weak. Gleaming atop your desk at work, these totems of potency dare people to acknowledge their presence with a calibrated test-blend of serious appreciation and ironic distance— and woe be to anyone who calibrates incorrectly. Everyone will want to touch the brass balls, feel their impressive weight, their uncompromising hardness. They are the family jewels.

These brass balls are sold in legal, kit form, and it is your responsibility not to assemble and use them as the deadly weapon or that they are. The balls are not toy; they weigh over one pound, and they will smash fingers, eyes, teeth, and skulls if swung in a fit of unbridled rage. Think of brass knuckles whipping around on a string, but without the soft, velocity-limiting hand inside.


The brass balls kit is, frankly, extremely easy to assemble. Your sense of accomplishment from completing this one-minute task may therefore be limited, and following the standard build procedure offers little opportunity for adding your own unique stamp to the finished product. But the assembly instructions, written in dead-on MAKE magazine style by award-wanting projects editor Paul Spinrad (affiliation for identification purposes only), should entertain true Makers and the people who love them.

Note also that these high-quality brass balls re-gift beautifully. In today’s tough economic climate, gifts that gracefully re-gift are the best gifts of all!

Cinema buffs may associate the brass balls with the opening scene of Glengarry Glen Ross. Cable television viewers may recall similar “Big Brass Balls” from episodes of The Colbert Report. Lawyers may note, then, that this product is not solely derivative of any one intellectual work. Rather, it taps into the broader culture, expressing a common folk idiom that no single motion picture studio or playwright (to take some hypothetical examples) can plausibly claim exclusive rights to.

Enough reading. Are you going to buy the balls? Or are you too much of a wimp?