Food Living Outside Play Technology Workshop

Geometric sculpture from 72 pencils

by makendo on January 28, 2012

Table of Contents

Geometric sculpture from 72 pencils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Intro: Geometric sculpture from 72 pencils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Related Instructables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

http://www.instructables.com/id/Geometric-sculpture-from-72-pencils/
 Author:makendo
I like to make stuff more than I like to buy things

Intro: Geometric sculpture from 72 pencils

George W. Hart is a sculptor of constructive geometric forms (and writer of the Math Monday columns at Make ), and I've long been an admirer of his work. Reproducing
his art is far from trivial - I once tried to build his Chronosynclastic Infundibulum , but broke so many CDs I gave up in disgust. However, I recently discovered that
Alejandro Erickson , instructable-r and self-confessed mathemagician, lives in the same city as me and runs workshops on geometric construction, so we hired him for an
afternoon. He was the great geometry guru we'd hoped he'd be, and he kept 6 kids and 3 adults well entertained and busy making tensegrities . As a special request, he
also taught two of us how to make a replica of Hart's 72 pencils sculpture (Hart made a limited edition of 19 unique examples of these). It took a couple of leisurely
hours to build and glue, and with supervision was surprisingly easy to make. It can be assembled inexpensively using wooden pencils ($5.74 for 72), a few rubber
bands and a little superglue , in pretty much exactly the same way as Alejandro makes his Hexastix sculptures (see below for the video). The hexagonal cross-section
of the pencils make them a very natural fit for this geometric form, as the holes in the lattice are themselves hexagonal. The erasers are arranged tetrahedrally with
respect to one another; the volume enclosed by the pencils is a rhombic dodecahedron . It's a neat piece of art that I'm pleased to own; many thanks to George W. Hart
for the inspiration and Alejandro for the instruction!

Video: Follow Alejandro's instructions, but build only as far as a hexagon consisting of a ring of 18 pencils, removing the inner pencils as you go. If you find the erasers aren't arranged tetrahedrally (as I

did), just invert one ring one pencil at a time until your sculpture looks like the original. Superglue the joints before removing the rubber bands.

Image Notes Image Notes

1. The completed "72 pencils" sculpture 1. Interestingly, the pencils came from Staples in boxes containing exactly... 72
pencils.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Geometric-sculpture-from-72-pencils/
 Image Notes Image Notes
1. The first three directions, wrapped up with rubber bands to keep everything in 1. The fourth direction gets added by squishing down the other three and
place. threading more pencils into the hexagonal holes

Image Notes Image Notes

1. Hexagonal arrangement of pencils. As you add extra layers to the outside, you 1. Another layer. Note the holes where the previous layer was - the pencils
remove the inner pencils - which generally try and fall out anyway! have been removed and moved outwards.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Geometric-sculpture-from-72-pencils/
 Image Notes Image Notes
1. Starting on the fourth layer. You spend lots of time adding pencils only to 1. Alejandro explaining how to finish the last layer
remove them at a later stage!
2. This set of pencils is back to front. I fixed them by end-for-ending each pencil in
the ring once I'd completed the sculpture. It was easy to do, but better to pay
more attention at the start.

Image Notes Image Notes

1. Ready for supergluing. Just let capillary action draw the superglue into the 1. It took us a leisurely couple of hours, but Alejandro made his in 25 minutes
joints - all gluing was carried out inside the large hexagons. It takes some time to flat
do, but it's almost imperceptible when you're done.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Geometric-sculpture-from-72-pencils/
 Image Notes
1. Wikipedia's image of a rotating rhombic dodecahedron, the shape of the
interior cavity of this sculpture

Related Instructables

"Mad Chopstick Red Vinyl Build a Frabjous

Burr" 10 x Frabjous by Grymee My
Madder (video) (Photos) by Mad Chopstick Anti-Yo entry: Paper and Tape
by emattrose Burr by imatfaal The Kanda-Hart Jitterbug
alejandroerickson (video) by (Tensegrity
onetrickwonder Model) by
Positron_Flux

http://www.instructables.com/id/Geometric-sculpture-from-72-pencils/