Following up on my recent exploration of geometric distortions to square tubes, this test fold takes that exploration in a new direction. In my previous explorations of designs where the twist has more sides than the tube, I always had the issue that to make the paper lengths match up, the twist was never flat. That led to some limitations when trying to design models using those twists – the twist took up a lot of height in the model, and it was harder to make sure the model would be stable long-term and not want to tilt and drift as it aged.
This is the first successful test fold of a new approach to twists with mismatched numbers of sides. The twist is flat because the extra paper along each edge is tucked inside the model. The concept isn’t that much more complicated than what I’ve been doing in other designs, but it took quite a bit of geometry and algebra to get all of the paper lengths correct.
This is obviously only half of the full twist, but a second half could easily be stacked on top of it. Similar to some of my older explorations with the non-flat twists, it should be possible to stack different shapes on top of each other. I’ll have more to come on exploring this new direction further.
