An efficient ball picker you can make yourself !

You can make yourself a ping-pong ball picker easily with household materials . All you need is a container to hold the balls, a rod for the handle , a few rubber bands and some duct tapes !

1)    I used the  plastic casing of a DVD holding tower  ( for no particular reason : it was lying around my desktop PC ! see Pic_01 ) , cut out the bottom  and ended up with basically a short cylindrical tube.

2)    Six holes were made on one end of  the  tube near the edge  .  Three  rubber bands were then strung across at 30. mm  spacings (see Pic_ 02 ). They should be a bit tight to enable the ball easily popped  into the container  when the  device is pushed straight down  on it .

3)    A wooden rod was then attached to the container by duct tapes (see Pic_03 ), served as the handle of the ball picker . Pic_ 04 showed the top view of the container .

        Pic_01

   cPic_02

      Pic_03

      Pic_04

You can watch this ball picker in action in the video below :

Edited by mike1250 - 09/08/2017 at 10:48am

[QUOTE=Fulanodetal]

You are right !  I even made a mini ball picker for a friend of mine  who has  stiff knees but  still loves to play ping-pong . Watching him bending down to pick-up the ball is heart-wrenching sometimes . The mini version can pick up one ball at a time and he  is much happier these days with my contraption .

Check out this video and see the mini ball picker in action :




Edited by mike1250 - 09/08/2017 at 10:47am

[QUOTE=pdotec]

Great suggestions for further refinement  ! Using another set of rubberbands orthogonal to the original ones, however,  might not be efficient in multi-ball pick-up  as balls can get stuck in adjacent square slots .  Thanks , pdotec  .


Edited by mike1250 - 09/08/2017 at 1:49pm

I used a plastic trash can with the bottom cut out and facing up, and strung it like a tennis racket with old tennis strings It works quite well. I put bike grips on a broomstick and screwed it to the can to make it more comfortable.