Another photo of beaded icosahedron

Yet another bead model of rhombicuboctahedron

Another rhombicuboctahedron using beads with long-aspect ratio:

Bead model of an Icosidodecahedron

Bead model of an Icosidodecahedron:

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.

Beaded icosahedrons

Beaded models for icosahedron are harder to make. This is because each vertex has five edges connected to it, so one has to face a pentavalent coordination. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to make a pentavalent coordinate with spherical beads. But if want use beads with long aspect ratio, stable and beautiful icosahedral structures can still be made.

Ping-Pong ball in a beaded dodecahedron

From beaded fullerene

Chuang made it.

青城山上的 cuboctahedron

I found this cuboctahedron in a walking trail of the QingCheng mountain:

Here is the beaded cuboctahedron I made a long time ago. 青城山上清宮老蔣題的匾額： From 青城山

From 青城山

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

Cube

C20, Dodecahedron: another beaded representation

truncated tetrahedron

Tetrahedron

C60 with each bond built from two spherical beads and one tube

In the following figure we show the beaded model for C60 based on the composite bead technique. The final shape is not quite satisfying as we can see it is a little bit distorted. This is probably due to that the sizes and shapes of the constituent beads and tubes are not exactly the same. I believe a better structure can be constructed if we can control the sizes and shapes in a better way.

Dodecahedral C20 with correct bond shape and force field

Previously, I have shown that beads with spherical shape can effectively mimic sp2 force field of fullerenes. However, these beads represent bonds instead of atoms. This may lead to confusion for students. We can avoid this problem by using beads with large aspect ratio, but the resulting structure usually has poor mechanical stability. Here Chuang has created a nice beaded fullerene of C20 (Ih) which can clearly exhibit the bond network of fullerene and at the same time possess great stability.