Oval shaped beads

I bought some plastic oval shaped beads a few months ago. I only made a buckyball with this kind of beads and never used them again. I saw these beads this afternoon accidentally and decided to make some more simple models with these oval shaped beads. So, here are five Platonic solids and a rhombic triacontahedron I made.

Another Rhombic dodecahedron

I made this rhombic dodecahedron a few days ago.

One more beaded rhombic triacontahedron

It is very easy to make rhombic triacontahedron. I made one more using different kind of beads.

Rhombic triacontahedron

I created this beaded model of rhombic triacontahedron this morning.

Ball of whacks

I bought this ball of whacks in the Smithsonian store at Dullus airport, Wahsington D.C. last month.
This ball is basically a rhombic triacontahedron consisted of 30 magnetic design blocks.

Beads with long aspect ratio

In the previous post, I shown two beautifully dual beaded models made by Chuang, which give an interesting application of beads with long aspect ratio. Due to the color of these beads, the contrast of these photos is not good. I made scanned images for these two new beaded models. The contrast seems to be better than the photo.




Previously, we have used this kind of beads to made a model of C₆₀. The resulting structure is quite flexible and can be deformed easily under external stress. We claimed that beads with long aspect ratio is not suitable for constructing stable fullerenes. Now Chuang discovered that these beads are good for creating their dual structures. The rigidity of resulting structures are very large.

Dual of Beaded Molecules: C60 and T120

These couple of days I have been thinking about the usage of the rice-shaped beads we bought a long time ago when I just began to make beaded molecules. I realized at that time that they are not good materials for endurable beaded molecules since the structure is not stable usually. But it turns out that this kind of beads are quite suitable for constructing the duals of fullerenes. Take a look at the following two dual models, one for C60 and the other for T120, created by Chuang.







These dual beaded molecules have pretty good mechanical strength due to, in my speculation, the tensegrity of such structures.