Lauderhill, FL resident Joel Waul said goodbye today (October 29) to his prized possession — a 6-foot, 7-inch tall, 9032-pound rubber band that he has painstaking put together over the past six years.

Declared the world’s biggest in 2008 by Guinness World Records, the ball has been bought by the Orlando-based Ripley’s Believe It or Not museums.

After sending a crane to take it away, vice president of the company Edward Meyer says: “We already have the largest string and barbed-wire balls. This is now my holy trinity, I guess.”

As for how Joel came up with the stretchy idea? He apparently saw a Ripley’s television special that showed the then-largest rubber band ball being dropped into the desert from an airplane.

He says: “I just thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”