Another photo of beaded icosahedron

Platonic solids with cylindrical bonds

Cylindrical beads that have capsule shape are perfect pedagogical materials for creating physical models of fullerenes since they can look like the chemists' intuition of chemical bonds and, at the same time, effectively mimic the steric repulsion among different beads. To demonstrate these points, here, we use these beads to create the five Platonic solids. 

Platonic Solids

I bought these elongated beads last week, on sale, of course. The shape of these beads are closer to that of chemical bonds. I have used these beads to create five Platonic solids. They look great.

Tetrahedron


Cube



Octahedron




Dodecahedron



Icosahedron