Geometry: Icosahedron corner connectors for wooden skewers by hagyma

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This corner connectors are used to join together inexpensive wooden skewers (barbecue sticks) into one of the Platonic solids: Icosahedron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid). This is an inexpensive way to create different forms for education purpose possibly in schools.
The original design can be viewed at http://a360.co/2ndlxqG.
There are 2 variants with 3.5 and 3.2mm hole (approx 1/8″), this fits the most common wooden skewers on the market around us. We can create different dimensions if needed.
Story: Together with my 8 years old daughter Emma we are on a journey to learn about geometry, 3D designing and printing. Playing around with this sticks to create different geometric shapes, we thought would be nice to have a way of connecting them. This was good opportunity to learn some more about designing or printing. We learned that printing very small things is problematic without powerful part cooling. Our recommendation is to print more maybe all 12 corners at once.
We are planning to design connectors for more geometrical forms and donate some to the local school for didactic purpose.
Hope others will find this useful for learning or ornamental purposes. We are planning to make a Icosahedron chandelier.
EDIT: we also added a Dodecahedron to the collection https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2774287.