I bought a sheet of ultra thin 1 ply Birdseye Maple veneer the other day and decided that It would look beautiful as a dodecahedron. I used some glue to attach it to cardstock and then cut it out as the net of a dodecahedron. I used a X-acto knife to lightly etch the fold lines on both the cardstock and the veneer so that it would fold crisply. I glued it all together using superglue. This post shows the net and how to fold it.
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9 Comments
Looks very nice! Now all you need is wood dye to make it darker...
Not with Maple! One of the pretty parts of Maple is the lightness. I might get some exotics and play with that a little bit.
Not saying a little bit of oil might not improve it a bit... I just don't want to darken it in this case.
And thanks!
how did i miss this? it looks awesome! craftsmanship turned out well. looks like i should play with that veneer i have sitting around.
Thanks!
The 1-ply stuff is "foldable" I glued it to the cardstock before folding it. I had used a knife to lightly etch the carstock before gluing it. I then etched the veneer by overlaying a regular piece of paper and cut through that lightly etching the veneer. It was a little bit of a fussy process...Still worth playing around with. I'm going to have to buy some more and figure out a way to write a tutorial on it. I also want to play around with creating something that looks like an inlayed version by mixing and matching veneers.
the seams look really good.
hello cory,
i thought it might be to cool to make a Bird's Eye Maple Veneered Dodecahedron with a clear acrylic base, glue the veneer on the outside and have a small access hole for a small light and hang it on a tree for part of the year. also a clear coat might help protect it. in cutting the acrylic the 72 degrees for the perimeter of the pentagon is pretty obvious, but the compound angle does not reveal itself immediately to me. how do you calculate that?
have a pleasant day
That's a cool idea. It seems that you should use half of the dihedral angle for the dodecahedron. According to that wikipedia link the dihedral angle is about 116.5 so you would want the angle to be 58.25 degrees with 90 degrees being the standard way to cut a board.
@ terry... great idea. if you do it, please share on the corkboard.
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