The file 'Laser Cut Octahedron Model Kit' is (svg) file type, size is 6.02 KB.
This project is an preliminary attempt at designing a flexible 3D construction kit. Ideally, the fully realized kit will be similar in spirit to legos... but more suited to modeling complex solid geometry.
So far, the kit has 2 primitives: a vertex and an edge. The vertex is a disk with 4 equally spaced notches cut into its edge. The edge has 2 rotating heads (one on each end) which are notched to slot into the vertex disk.
An easy way to increase the expressiveness of this kit would be to add vertex disks with 3 and 5 notches. Given those parts, one could make tetrahedra, cube, and dodecahedra models (3 notch vertex disks), as well as icosahedra models (5 notch vertex disks). The same edge primitives built in this kit could be reused.
The octahedron is the only platonic solid whose vertices terminate 4 edges, so that's it for this kit. To build the object, 6 vertices and 12 edges are required. The svg file has 16 edges and 16 vertices.
whatnot4.svg |