Computer controlled cutting

The structure that I tried to cut was based on Quasicrystals. This kind of spatial structures have some interesting properties when building a construction kit.

First, it has five fold symmetry, which allows us to create non periodical patterns in space, think of it as somerhing really close to the Penrose pattern, but in 3D instead of 2D. Second, (and after some thought involved) you just need to elements to build this non peridical structure, which make it really easy to do the nesting configuration of the 2D pattern.

The material used to build the structure was 1 mm. thick white cardboard. This had to be taken into account for the development of the joints.

First thing I did was getting the two polyhedra that form the Quasicrytalic pattern. The key thing in building them was building the Golden rhombus used for them. This was the geometrical development of the two polyhedra.

Next, I played with the spatial configuration of the two polyhedra a little bit to see the flexibility and if there were any problems between seams. (there shouldn't be, as it was geometrically constructed... but you never know when you could find a floating point error, as we were dealing with golden ratios).

Next was a little bit of trial and error and mistakes with thickness of the material. As I know now how it works, I'll probably try a bigger version later in the semester (when dealing with big scale and the CNC router) done with parametrical joints in Grasshopper.

Here is the nested pattern for laser cutting. Easy nesting, the only thing to take into account was cutting order. I prefer to tell the cutting inside-out order with layers to the machine, as we have found that the algorithm is prone to mistakes.

Some final shots of the result.