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Binder Clip Sculptures

My friend Zach Abel has come up with an impressive assortment of binder clip sculptures. I love the idea of taking everyday objects and turning them into amazing things, so I felt compelled to try making some of my own.

I used the join that Zach uses for his Clipped Corners to create a cuboctahedron (my favorite Archimedean solid!).
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I then added some extra binder clip handles to add points and accentuate the octahedral symmetries. Somewhat surprisingly, these extra handles can slot into place and from quite a rigid sculpture. Some of Zach’s sculptures use fewer handles than clips, now there is a way to make use of all of those excess handles!
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It turns out that you can get binder clips in many colors, so it seemed obvious that some of the sculptures should show off the symmetric colorings associated with their symmetry groups. The Icosahedral group has a nice five-coloring and a nice six-coloring. I used miniature binder clips to create this five-colored version of Zach’s Clipped Corners sculpture. Perhaps I will eventually make a six-colored version sometime to round out the set.
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Knotted Origami

seems like just the thing that I should like – seeing as I clearly very much like origami and knots. For exhibit here is an origami cubeoctahedron out of business cards that has been wrapped by a strand of red cord. The cord wraps around several times with four strand braids occurring every time four strands overlay. The resulting shape outlined by a cord is tetrahedral. I made this on the plane to G4GX. While there, I also worked on making a business card tetrahedron wrapped with octahedral knotwork, which, unfortunately, seems to have been misplaced.

Is this the launch of a new era of hybrid origami knotwork? One can only hope. =)
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Zometool

Zometool is a building system consisting of a variety or rods that can be slotted into balls at a variety of angles. It provides much more construction flexibility than the building toys you may have encountered as a child. For example, the structure in the first image is a projection onto three dimensions of a truncated 600-cell. I helped build these models in January 2004.

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