or
1d20 of art with a +3 for cool friends
(UPDATE: It Is Accomplished. All the finished panels can be seen here.)
phase I: conception and construction
I got the idea while looking at this lamp shade project that it would be neat to make a polygon of some sort covered with drawings. Since I'm no artist, I figured I would do the construction myself and rope my friends in to doing the art.
I had to figure out a few things: what shape to make, what to make the frame out of, how to connect the vertices of the polygon, what paper to use, and how to attach the paper to the frame. The first decision was to settle on making an icosahedron, a 20-sided polygon. Next up was materials. My fencing coach - who is quite handy at building small things - suggested brass rods, sold in about 3' lengths at hobby and hardware stores. Since I was looking to make an icosahedron about 2' across, this would be perfect. I picked some up and started experimenting.
The only real hurdle was figuring out how to fasten the rode to eachother. At first I considered cutting the rods so they would form up in exactly the right angle and then soldering five together at each vertex, but I decided I couldn't get the required precision without better equipment (my equipment consisted of my Dremel and... a hammer). I experimented with soldering ball bearings at the vertices (i.e. having each of the five rods attach to the ball bearing) but this just didn't work and was getting to be a mess. Finally I decided to try a method used for making geodesic domes out of steel tubing: crimp then ends, drill a hole, and put a pin through five of them. This worked perfectly:
I then screwed five of them together to form a vertex
repeated as necessary, and had an icosahedron:
I got the idea while looking at this lamp shade project that it would be neat to make a polygon of some sort covered with drawings. Since I'm no artist, I figured I would do the construction myself and rope my friends in to doing the art.
I had to figure out a few things: what shape to make, what to make the frame out of, how to connect the vertices of the polygon, what paper to use, and how to attach the paper to the frame. The first decision was to settle on making an icosahedron, a 20-sided polygon. Next up was materials. My fencing coach - who is quite handy at building small things - suggested brass rods, sold in about 3' lengths at hobby and hardware stores. Since I was looking to make an icosahedron about 2' across, this would be perfect. I picked some up and started experimenting.
The only real hurdle was figuring out how to fasten the rode to eachother. At first I considered cutting the rods so they would form up in exactly the right angle and then soldering five together at each vertex, but I decided I couldn't get the required precision without better equipment (my equipment consisted of my Dremel and... a hammer). I experimented with soldering ball bearings at the vertices (i.e. having each of the five rods attach to the ball bearing) but this just didn't work and was getting to be a mess. Finally I decided to try a method used for making geodesic domes out of steel tubing: crimp then ends, drill a hole, and put a pin through five of them. This worked perfectly:
 |
 |
 |
| crimped the end and punched a hole |
smoothed out the corners and
rough spots
around the hole |
bent the tab to the appropriate
angle |
I then screwed five of them together to form a vertex
repeated as necessary, and had an icosahedron:
also useful for protection from and emitting
evil Space Rays:
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