Thingamabobs

I took up residency with my Magical Thingamabobs nearly a year ago, and many things happened in the open air shop in Melbourne's prestigious CBD since then. I encountered all four seasons now, and could observe the change in angle of the sun towards our planet.

Some people claim that my art work isn't 'emotional', which might hold true to a certain degree. Nevertheless, I experienced the gamut of fear, anger, grief, love, sadness and worry while patiently and persistently doing my work.

The 6 strut icosahedron and the 12 strut octahedron remain my most popular objects, but there's some shapes I discontinued, and a new set of objects to reassemble each time around. As my camera equipment doesn't work too well, I probably missed the opportunity to document some objects I haven't build since then.

Close encounter - 6 strut tetrahedron

I noticed that reassembling some of the objects creates some wear, and a loss of tension. The model above has reworked to have single-string connections to each corner. The 20cm Pars inspired tetrahedron has been painted a little bit to look even more distinct.

Japanese Butterfly - 12 strut tetrahedron

I love the shape of the 24 strut cuboctahedron, and build some colour variation with it. While four colours bring out the four intersection double triangles in the structure, using black as only colour works aesthetically well.

Checkerboard - 24 strut cuboctahedron

An icosahedron with suspended wireframe tetrahedron act as the current 'eye-catcher' for the front row. The transport made the doubled strings a bit weaker, the suspended centrepiece brings it back into good shape. 

Captured tetra - 6 strut icosahedron with suspended tetrahedron

The dodecahedron gets really wobbly as 30 strut structure. I found two variations for it, though. The first one consists of an 6 strut icosahedron, joined like the one above. By connecting the ends of the parallel sticks the strings outline 12 pentagonal faces. The other variation starts as 5 strut prism, with five more sticks outside the girth of it. 

10 strut dodecahedron

Painting the end of the sticks black adds another dimension to the structure, and works well for many basic shapes. The model below has already found a new home, but as I enjoy playing with this one most, it will have a rebirth soon.

12 strut octahedron with elastic and non-elastic string

The amount of 'un-playable' objects increases. The latest one of those offers plenty of potential for all sort of variation. The outer tendons shape a tetrahedron, the sticks are attached to its corner and miss each other in the central hub made of four tendons.

Black flag post 4 strut x-module based tetrahedron

I have two of 4 strut pyramids on display - the 15 cm version above, and a 30 cm one. And some more at home, one version with aluminium tube as struts. I want to explore whether I can use these tetrahedral modules to build a star tetrahedron, that might be a nice project for a rainy day.

I took some of the photos here from the blog Hello Mrs. Morris, who wrote a nice article about me and my work.

Frog in the well

Frog in the well

I went to the local hardware store to find a small table saw. It could make preparing wooden struts much faster and even more precise than the Dremel, but I'll have to wait to find out. Instead, I brought a 3m aluminium tube home and got busy.

The first hole I drilled was too wide to hold a knotted nylon string, yet I decided to worry about this fact later and prepared three alu struts for a prism, each with three equidistant holes about 2cm from the end. Doubling the tendon should provide additional strength, and a knot of two strings of nylon held safely in the hole.

I used the measures taking from a bamboo strut structure with nearly 1m struts. I adjusted the final tension by pulling the vertical tendons overly tight, and then knotting off between 2 and 5 cm of it. I ended up with the box shape I wanted, with decent tautness. I did a stress test by putting a zabuton on top, and it took the load nicely.

I pushed the end of the strings back, and riveted the end of the tubes. The construction details hidden, not perfectly but nicely balanced, evenly spaced holes made it a satisfying piece by itself. Yet it invited me to do more, to use it as base for a more complex tensegrity.

After installing two bamboo tensuls into the top triangle, and playing around with spheres on top of them, I build a 30-strut icosahedron with nylon strings. I chose a strut length I didn't use before, and estimated the string length required, with nasty consequences. The overall tension split one after another strut, as could drops from just one meter height.

The drop resistance might not have improved, yet in its current installation the structure is unlikely to be exposed to excess stresses. The sphere now rests on a single smaller tensul, with a 3:1 ratio of strut length from basis to middle part, and a 3:1 ratio of strut length and upper triangle of the support for the sphere.

Instead of a tension triangle, the base of the support prism get its tension from three connected nylon string loops, connected to the lower end of the struts. A small Chinese bell with a frog sitting on it is suspended from the center.

Now all I need are three columns to elevate the model some more. The aluminium struts were easier to work with than I thought, and invite bigger structures.