Introduction: Geometric Sculpture From 72 Pencils
George W. Hart is a sculptor of constructive geometric forms (and writer of the Math Monday columns at Make), and I've long been an admirer of his work. Reproducing his art is far from trivial - I once tried to build his Chronosynclastic Infundibulum, but broke so many CDs I gave up in disgust. However, I recently discovered that Alejandro Erickson, instructable-r and self-confessed mathemagician, lives in the same city as me and runs workshops on geometric construction, so we hired him for an afternoon. He was the great geometry guru we'd hoped he'd be, and he kept 6 kids and 3 adults well entertained and busy making tensegrities. As a special request, he also taught two of us how to make a replica of Hart's 72 pencils sculpture (Hart made a limited edition of 19 unique examples of these). It took a couple of leisurely hours to build and glue, and with supervision was surprisingly easy to make. It can be assembled inexpensively using wooden pencils (conveniently sold in packs of 72!), a few rubber bands and a little superglue, in pretty much exactly the same way as Alejandro makes his Hexastix sculptures (see below for the video). The hexagonal cross-section of the pencils make them a very natural fit for this geometric form, as the holes in the lattice are themselves hexagonal. The erasers are arranged tetrahedrally with respect to one another; the volume enclosed by the pencils is a rhombic dodecahedron. It's a neat piece of art that I'm pleased to own; many thanks to George W. Hart for the inspiration and Alejandro for the instruction!
I made a variant of this sculpture using 76 pencils, in which the pencils form six-pointed stars rather than hexagons. I used colored pencils for that one, but couldn't find a nice set of exactly 76. There are good sets of 72 colored pencils available, though.
Video: Follow Alejandro's instructions, but build only as far as a hexagon consisting of a ring of 18 pencils, removing the inner pencils as you go. If you find the erasers aren't arranged tetrahedrally (as I did), just invert one ring one pencil at a time until your sculpture looks like the original. Superglue the joints before removing the rubber bands.
Step 1: Builds
Happily, lots of people have made this sculpture, and some of them have shared their builds with me. They've often been very creative too, using among other things BBQ skewers, copper pipe, pvc and toothpicks! Thanks to guerroloco, jayefuu, EVM, akarod79, palmsco, mrpesas, XP1 and innovationcreation for sharing.
4 People Made This Project!
- innovationcreation made it!
- guerroloco made it!
- guerroloco made it!
- Jayefuu made it!
52 Comments
5 months ago on Introduction
I'm going to try this with some very "high risk" at risk students. What type of glue do you recommend I use?
Reply 5 months ago
Superglue. Good luck!
7 years ago
Saw this and thought what a great project to do with my son (9 yrs old). Of course I left him do 95% of it. He then told me "gluing is going to be tough, so you can do that." So here is our completed project. We had a small accident where we...my son...we broke a pencil and the only other pencil we had was a green one. We decided to keep it as memory.
Reply 7 years ago on Introduction
Great job!
9 years ago on Introduction
So I had to make one of these. It was a lot easier than it looks. I have absolutely no need for it at ALL but I just had to try it. Luckily, my sister-in-law is a teacher so I gave it to her and she loved it.
Next step, build this using PVC pipe for a huge yard sculpture. ;-)
9 years ago
Awesome
9 years ago
I'm gonna try it tomorrow
9 years ago on Introduction
great!
10 years ago on Introduction
can i use this as my cantamaths project in school???
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
fill your boots
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
sorry i didnt catch that...could you please say it differently? THNX
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
"Sure"
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
thanks you very much!
10 years ago on Introduction
I could not find 72 pencils at my house so I made it out of toothpicks and used rubber bands from when I had braces.
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
That's really neat. Thanks for posting it!
10 years ago on Introduction
Wonderful- excellent work.
10 years ago on Introduction
Thank you so much for the Instructable and video. It took a while; however, I finally figured it out. Now I just need to get some Super-Glue.
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
Nice!
10 years ago on Introduction
Just like to let you know that I built one of these and that it works as a vary unique pencil holder.
10 years ago on Introduction
would it be easier or harder to use straws?