Once again, friends, it's time for another edition of SICAPSTBTITEATWIN1 and this time we are making a slim octet truss. Perfect for pavilions, if you’ve got the cash, or ant farms if that's how you roll. I’m not size-ist.
I'll start with the end in mind. More about the octet truss here, and here.
And it is really thin as well:
Which makes for a nice, light-weight roof, and cuts down on bulk materials. Best of all, there was zero (arithmetic) math involved here. Take a rectangle, draw in a diagonal, then mirror that rectangle and you see the squished face of the octahedron emerge.
Do that enough times to have a chain of seven triangles. Decorate as you please. I happen to like op art.
Give your assistant something to do.🙄
Cut out the strips. Try to be neat. Give your assistant a treat. The following gallery shows folding and gluing. You have been warned.
The next gallery is about folding in the missing tetrahedron for your octet truss construction. It involves even more folding in, and you have this been warned.
Of course, it doesn’t take too much thought to imagine using different aspect ratios of your initial rectangles to produce octa faces of whatever height requirements you have. Instead of just a roof, you could have a column for holding the roof up. That will be for a future entry, however, and there will be more folding it in.
Steve Is Cutting and Pasting Shapes Together Because Therapy Is Too Expensive And The World Is Nuts.