Interlocking Papercraft Polyhedra (Five Tetrahedra)

Hello there, I’m sorry for not posting continuously over the past few days. I had an emergency that needed to be taken care of. Thanks to Dyanna who has emailed me and encouraged me to continue posting. I’ll keep it up. :p

I had been playing around with papercraft for some time now (I’m not very good at it, oft bungling up the fold lines; and yes, I have strange hobbies like these), and recently I had a brainwave to google for papercraft polyhedra. Since folding and making papercraft CCTV cameras is clearly not my thing, I thought I’d settle for something simpler instead - polyhedra.

Alas, to my dismay, I find that simple polyhedra like cubes and pyramids are easy, but more complex ones are really really difficult to fold and make.

Today’s Math-Art is by Paul over at zenoli. He used Thomas Hull’s design to make this interlocking tetrahedra (a tetrahedron is a polyhedron with 4 triangle sides).

Ah, I can only observe these people make good polyhedra. Alas, my clumsy fingers almost always cause the paper to get wrongly folded, and stuff. I mean, just look at Magnus Wenninger’s intricate paper polyhedra models. You start wondering how fine his fingers were when he started making them and how patient he was when he made them.

Or look at the Stellated Curved Tetrahedra. Such wonderment!

I got my initial papercraft models from Gijs Korthals Altas’ site. Great site for beginner polyhedron models (even so, I bung things up past the cube). If you want something more complex, you can use Stella, a program for designing papercraft models. I played with Stella, and it’s cool. Really cool. Math-Art approved

And as for getting your papercraft supplies, you can try papers from Blue Edge Craft (if you’re Aussie of course). Now it’s back to glue-ing those damn dastardly pyramids together (and hope I don’t squash them)