Bonnie Stewart Building Blocks
As you know, I’m really into polyhedra. There have been lots of fascinating books written about polyhedra over the years, but one of the most interesting (and quirky) ones is Bonnie Stewart’s Adventures among the toroids. It’s full of really interesting shapes, and I’ve printed several of them since I got my Form 2. But I realized recently that it’d be more interesting to be able to play around with how their constructed. Most of them are actually assembled from a fairly small set of building blocks. So I made models of those building blocks and printed those. Here are a few of them.
I needed a way to get them to hold together so that I could assemble them. To do that, I left a small hole in each face. Then I got a bunch of small magnets. I used super glue to stick the magnets into the holes. If you do this, don’t glue your fingers together. You’ll feel silly. Trust me.
Of course magnets are pretty picky about which way they go together. Since most of professor Stewart’s toroids have cupolas surrounded by smaller blocks, I stuck magnets on the cupolas with the north pole facing out, and onto all the others with the south pole facing out. I did get a couple wrong though.
Once I did that, I could stick them together in various configurations from the book. Like this one, which is one of my favorites.
They’re kind of a fun toy. Here’s the latest one I’m working on.
If you’d like to print your own copy of these blocks, you can download them from my Pinshape account.