Why wouldn’t plain ol’ clay cat litter work?
I would be afraid of any nut shell. Walnut shells have an oily inside. They may treat it though. Not sure.
I have pecan trees and the hull breaks down pretty fast. The squirrels litter my deck with them. They start out sharp and if they’re not swept they go to powder pretty quickly. Walnut shells would be durable, I suppose.
I would think cat litter of any sort would pull moisture from the air and eventually get nasty. Most would probably rub against itself and eventually turn to powder and then mud. (Just guessing here.) I suppose a lot depends upon where you live. Here in Northern Virginia we consider 60% humidity to be low.
Some people around here get cocoa bean shells to use as mulch in their gardens. It smells like heaven for a day or two, but the smell goes away fairly quickly. They are pretty light weight and soft-ish without being easily flattened.
Would peat moss work?
What about cork bits?
Way too heavy.
Cherry pits have a good size, are hollow-ish thus relatively light and last forever. They can be expensive, and I don’t know whether and if yes, where you can get them in the USA.
40# for ~$40: PIT STUFF
The reason the manufacturers used EPS beads is that they worked. Light, durable, formable, non-clumping, non-deteriorating. Choosing any other substance is choosing to do a bad job for some reason unrelated to function.
Airsolf pellets?
As long as we a throwing out all kinds of ideas… What about those bark chips they use in play grounds?
Or Rubber Mulch?
Pieces are probably too big though.
I’d be afraid he’d suffocate.
It’s not actually eliminating the Beanie Baby, though; it’s just leaving you with an empty Beanie Baby pelt. Maybe you could make tiny little BB-skin rugs for dollhouses?
Oh, I had not intended to take the guts out of the BBs; just put a few dozen of the devil spawn inside the beanbag intact, wave buh-bye to them all, & zip 'er up!
Although you do have the germ of an interesting idea there. How about this?:
Remove the stuffing and fill your chair with it. Which leaves you with a mound of Beanie Baby pelts. Then make sort of a patchwork quilt full-sized floor rug from them. Not all neatly cut into squares, just kind of a Frankenstein monster skin of roughly stitched pelt-shapes. It’d be an awesome addition to anyone’s chamber of horrors. It’d be especially effective at turning a little kid into a future serial killer. See what Mommy did to your little friends?
You can tell my wife is binge-watching Stephen King DVDs. Not my style, but they give me … ideas.
Like this, but with beanie babies?
I had a girlfriend back in about 1970 or so that had one filled with actual dried beans, Maybe pinto beans? It was real comfortable. The later versions filled with Styrofoam beads were not so comfortable
If you have two kinds of fill material, they’ll quickly sort themselves out and separate, which probably won’t give whatever feel you were trying for.
Is that for the bottom of the drop pit?
Yeah thought the same when buckwheat was mentioned.
Yes. The deceleration cart was 5’ diameter and 20’ deep. We had custom canvas bags made which were 8’ cubes on a tubing frame. Three of them would fit on a semi trailer and we would send them to the manufacturer to be filled We stored them outside for at least a month before using them after the fire.
We vacuumed them out after each drop to re-fluff them. The flow of the beads in the flex hose generated thousands of volts of static electricity. Vacuuming them up was one of the first jobs I had when I started as a technician apprentice. My ground strap came off once and I drew about a 4" spark when I got near a steel post. Did. Not. Do That. Again.
Aaah, yes. “Self-critiquing behavior” in USAF’s memorable phrase. I bet that HURT! Sorry you had to get that one the hard way.
It not only hurt but I was on top of a 20’ high platform with minimal railings. Another job I had at that facility was to change film in a camera on the “ceiling”. But this was a chamber about 40’ diameter and the ladder wound around the inside of the damn thing. So you started up vertically, then began turning upside down as you went past the center. You had to flip over at some point as the rungs were now on the other side and you were laying on them like a jungle gym. I’m afraid of heights and was absolutely terrified.
This was the same chamber that held the 3-axis gimbal rig the original astronauts had trained on only a few years earlier.
https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/historic-facilities/altitude-wind-tunnel/awt-timelines/