Cube/Sphere Dissection, Kawai Tsugite Style, Cube Joint, Math Puzzle

Last crawled date: 6 years, 2 months ago

The cube is forever a source of mathematical inspiration! There are so many ways to dissect it for puzzles, insights, or just fun! The Kawai Tsugite dissection is simple and elegant, providing great opportunities for students to play with powerful math and design ideas. One starts with a cube, slices two opposite corners off, and then splits the middle pieces using sketches along an equilateral triangle. One can keep one half of the pieces or choose to assemble both half-cubes.

This is probably an intermediate design project. The same process can also be applied on a sphere within the cube. The result, however, is not as much appealing because of the spherical symmetries.

0.2mm tolerance [ 02mmtolerance, the amount pushed back for the wedge surfaces] should be fine for most printers. 0.1mm tolerance gives some friction. Please feel free to experiment with different levels of tolerance between the wedges.

References:

https://woodgears.ca/puzzles/3way_joint.html

Bu, L. https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/exploring-liu-hui-s-cube-puzzle-from-paper-folding-to-3-d-design