As a member of Origami USA (OUSA), we get access to some member designs and this one stuck out as something fun to try:
Jason Ku’s Convertible uses some standard (and not so standard) box pleating tricks to sculpt a fully formed car from a flat sheet. Continue reading
Rowing is huge at my school – a veritable machine that hundreds of kids get very passionate about, a gear-fest like few others:
Seems the purpose of the sport is to put boys in lycra, sitting atop tiny fiberglass shells, armed with a paddle rowing furiously backwards across vast distances of water. The competitive nature sees rowers exerting huge amounts of energy, enthusiasm and biomass in singles, teams of 2,4,and 8 with or without cox against other equally keyed-up teams. Quite a spectacle.
I have been a fan of Star Trek since it was possible to be so, love the franchise, movies, series, the lot. I saw a diagram that resulted in an ATAT (All-Terrain Armoured Transport) – one of many fairly silly designs from The Babylon 5 universe, and with some shaming from a friend (thanks Dodes) I decided to give it a whirl.
If you were making a vehicle for battle, the last thing on the design bench (apart from a 2 legged chicken-like bipedal mobile gun turret) would be a quadruped.
Any Browncoat worth his part of the ‘verse would be able to ride their Viper Mark II with cables attached, tangle the legs and bring the thing down, like a heavy, falley-downey thing.
…so I am a teacher, and I teach senior students:
I have, on occasions, joked about how cool it would be to own a Segway – my classes are physically far apart and getting between campuses takes time, hence the idea that a PTD (personal transport device) would be cool. I _never_ in my wildest dreams imagined my students would do anything about this pipe dream – let’s face it, we all say things in jest.
It was an ambush, total surprise – I think I was the only one who knew nothing. It still gives me goosebumps thinking about it. I was teaching my year 11 class when the whole year 12 class arrived headed by Tom on a Segway. They had crowd-funded a second hand one as a end of year gift – wow, just wow!.
On receiving a lovely hard cover copy of “Extreme Origami” by Won Park from Book Depository (wow, how do they offer those prices, delivery times and no postage???) I naturally skipped to the back and looked for the nastiest fold to try:
This model is insane – I chickened out folding it on notes because the pre-creasing into 32nds with my fat clumsy fingers was not possible I thought so I scaled up and used plain paper for my first fold. Continue reading
