I think I need to reboot. Or something.

Pete K

Ulrich,

These are lovely. I wish I had your eye for colour.

Pete K

guy wrote:Ten cubes? Aren't there four of each colour, making 4 x 5 = 20 in all?

Yes, you are quite right ! How could I possibly think that there were 10 ?
Well spotted, Guy.

Pete K

http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/m629/polypete/Polyhedra/IMGP0652small.jpg

I'm sure that most of you saw it straight away, but it had me fooled until after I'd finished it. It is a compound of ten cubes, but I was convinced at first that it was a compound of only five - until I twigged that ...

My daughter found a picture of Magnus Wenninger and his model of this polhedron on the internet. I thought I'd have a go, and here's the result:
http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/m629/polypete/Polyhedra/IMGP0637smaller.jpg

The photo was taken looking down on one of the larger spikes; you can ...

What I'm looking for is an option to maintain the same RGB values for all pixels as they move position. I don't think that this necessarily implies a monochromatic light source, but I'm no expert in this area. personally, I don't need to be able to look at a patch of colour and identify it correctly ...

Would it be possible to turn off the lighting effects, so that colours are not changed as the polyhedron rotates ? Being red-green colourblind, I see face colours apparently change (for example, from green to yellow) as I rotate the model. I do this so that I can determine the arrangement of colours ...

Very nice model. You did very well with those large spikes given the combination of double tabs and thick card. Thanks for sharing it.

Pete K

Ideally, I would like to "fuse" the faces I cut out of CDs. Since they're basically plastic I can imagine I might melt them together if I could control the temperature. I'm sure there's some kinds of glue that bonds plastics really well. What I've tried in the past have eventually turned brittle ...

Jon,

Thanks for the info. I really think I should have one of those. Pehaps a quick peek on Amazon...

Cheers,

Pete K

I just use card of various types. I did have a go using CDs after reading how easy it is to cut them with scissors...ha! I also bough a sheet of acrylic and a special saw for plastics, but the result was a mess.

I've never used a dremmel; how do you use it to cut CDs ? What is the accuracy like ...

Jon,

They are great-looking models. Obviously, you have some artistic flair.

For me, its not so much the time that it takes that makes me reluctant to give them away, its the prospect of having to start all over again to replace the gift. Or maybe Im just mean!

Pete K

What do you use to draw the shapes of the faces prior to cutting out?

Certainly the colours do look good - I've always felt that the card that I use looks a bit drab!

I used Stella nets for this one. Sometimes I use a program of my own, but mostly I use Stella now. I take the Stella printouts ...

Rob,

I considered fishing line too, but I didn't try it. Instead, I used some linen repair thread, because I thought it would absorb the glue better. It worked really well in experiments, and held the pieces together rigidly, but it was very fiddly when it came to stringing more than two cells ...

I started off using the method suggested by MW, i.e using half a deltahedron as a construction cradle. In fact I tried three versions of the deltahedron, each more carefully constructed than the its predecessor. I found it difficult to access the cells to apply the glue and they moved about very ...