Damn! After reading thru 13+ pages of posts, I’m dying to know what in the Hell that thing is! 
Okay, as long as Someone Who Isn’t Me has re-animated this thread, I’ll throw in this tangential remark:
There used to be a very off-beat art gallery in Cambria (touristy beach town on Central California coast) called What Iz Art? that specialized in very off-beat art. Their motto was:
Good Art Won’t Match Your Sofa
+1! 
Damn, being bumped I thought someone had solved this.
Given the OP is still active and was on-line today, I do rather hope he will drop past and put us out of our misery.
You found out what it is? You found out what it is? You found out…
AWWWWWW!
I’m going with an engineering prototype.
They know its not fit to operate.
They are demonstrating the concept of an assembly that astronauts can put together and maintain. The whole thing was made with molten drink cans so it didn’t cost much. (could be worth a lot as aluminium scrap, but they are keeping it in case they want to use it again ? Perhaps mount it in a building foyer ? Or sell it to the Louvre ?)
I’m still going with “final project for some sort of class in metal casting”.
Sorry, I don’t subscribe to any threads because I post in far too many of them, so topics sometimes drop below my radar.
There is no question in my mind that the grid ball is an art project. I’ve visited it several times in past months. The yard managers actually moved it - and scared the hell out of me, I thought it was gone - and it’s still piled with a dozen other large dismantled sculptures.
I am going to make another serious attempt at buying it, but the salvage yard materials are in a “no man’s land” of ownership between several different entities, and each swears they have no jurisdiction over the item’s disposition.
I wish I had the balls to just drive over there with a hoist truck this weekend and take the stupid thing (and then make a donation to the U’s art program or something.) But I’d probably end up with a felony burglary rap or such. Crap.
“It’s such a cruel world we live in. But don’t worry honey. One day you’ll be mine, and we’ll never be apart again.”
I know of this huge metal one…
Just read this & followed all the links.
Most interesting & fun.
I am now blind, time to go watch TV.
I can’t see it. IE tells me that dgath.com is a known malicious website!
sigh I visit the location once a week and have about an hour to kill there, and it’s tremendously photogenic. I wander all over the place shooting odd things in various weather. The grid ball just happens to be in the center of the facility.
No feckin’ way. It’s one of my private hosting sites and there are no “active” files or platforms of any kind there, nor any outside upload capability. I hate these generic profile evaluators.
ETA: Just checked using several browsers; no warnings encountered. If you see it again, please PM me.
I’m still going with: “once Amateur Barbarian gets into their garage it will hatch.”
Grid Ball Unmasked At Last!
Funny this thread should pop up again today, just when we find this in a nearby thread:
ZenBeam was quick to notice this, at Post #4:
No, maybe this is the Grid Ball! 
Jesus, I know people like to read GQ and all. But what they say about going blind isn’t really true.
Something tells me this thing is the third word that ends in -gry.
It looks very similar to this, especially with that outer tube/ring.
Vaguely, but there’s no way the object of this thread is watertight, much less pressure-tight.