This paper structure is a massive 12 cm (5 inches) tall. It is made from 8 identical units that are each a simple rectangular box with lots of triangular holes. Jef built it to demonstrate the precision cutting and scoring abilities of his computer-controlled paper cutting knife (installed November 2000). Each of the 8 units is about 15 mm across, and the width of the diagonals is about 0.7mm. Parts for a structure such as this would be daunting to cut by hand.

The material is Wasau 110 lb. Index Card stock, which is great for making small- to medium-size paper models. Index Card stock in "letter" or "legal" sizes is stocked or can be quickly obtained (in the USA) by firms such as Staples and Office Depot. The surface is smooth and is readily printed with good detail and color saturation by an inkjet printer. Jef uses a wide-bed Epson 1520. He measured the weight of the stock at 203 g / sq. m and the thickness at 0.23 mm. Thus, the diagonals in the model are only three times the thickness of the underlying card stock. He’s managed to cut strips down to 0.48 mm, but they are quite fragile. I’ve made some polyhedra with the cutter, and the absolutely precise fit and the ease of making models accurate to 0.01 mm is impressive.

The parts are designed on a Macintosh using the Vellum CAD package, the drawing is converted to DXF format and then sent to the cutter. The photo was taken with a tripod-mounted Sony DSC-770 digital camera with a +1 diopter close-up lens. The background was two pieces of green writing paper taped together.