Cardboard!

…and I’m back!

It’s been a while since the last post. Partly, due to laziness and partly due to the lack of interesting content to actually post. There was a short break from Uni and then I had an incident on my way home from Uni on my bicycle. My second ring finger got squished so hard that the bone at the very tip forces its way through my skin and found itself sitting just outside the stop where the last joint is. I took some gruesome photos of it that won’t post here. Moving on through to what my last project was!

A cardboard chair! The task was to take a large sheet of cardboard, pre-determined in size, and made a char out of it that could support 80kg. The rules were simple, nothing but cardboard. No staples, tape or any other foreign fasteners… only cardboard. It’s definitely not something that hasn’t been done before, and done to death I don’t doubt.

I tried to focus on making the chair with as fewer separate pieces as possible to try and draw out as much strength in the material as possible. The result was two main parts, a seat and a backing, with a number of tiny fasteners to keep the whole thing together.

The Hexagon shape was inspired by an origami flower that I’d looked up while trying to figure out the best way to fold the cardboard. I folded one up out of paper and it seemed to be really strong, especially considering it was only made from paper at this point. There were way too many fold to make it out of the cardboard, so instead I came out with a simpler shape with less folds.

The back followed through just as something that I thought would be easy to slap on it and everything would be fine. How wrong I was. The back needed almost just as much strength in it as the seat. This is where it falls short of being a viable chair solution. For a first effort, I’m satisfied.