Post #676530

I just made this design, based on the "72 Pencils" sculptures by George Hart: https://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/pencils.html. George's design consists of 72 pencils arranged in a triangular lattice. His bundles of 18 pencils are arranged in a hollow hexagon pattern and are glued together. In this version, I create a 3D-printable polyhedron (a truncated octahedron) to hold the standard-sized hexagonal pencils. Each bundle consists of 19 pencils in a filled hexagonal pattern. Thus, it requires 76 pencils. Here's the 3D-printable file: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7313100 My first attempt was to make the faces with the hexagonal holes. The holes had to be offset in a certain way so that, when joined into a polyhedron, the pencils would line up correctly inside it. I kept making errors. Then, I decided to completely restart the project. I made the pencils and the polyhedron in OpenSCAD, then "subtracted" the pencils from the polyhedron to create the holes.