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Diamond edge crease pattern:


Alternate flap crease pattern for square faced construction:

Diamond Edge Unit Instructions

  1. First, fold two of the corners of the business card together. Make sure you always fold the same two, or else you'll end up with units that are differently handed and they won't fit together.
  2. Unfold then fold the long edges along the angle bisector. The corner will touch the other side at the same place that the first crease does.
  3. Unfold and fold the short edges along the angle bisector so that the short edge is parallel to the first crease. when folded, the two corners will touch.
  4. Unfold and then refold the folds from step two, followed by the folds from steps one and three. This completes the unit for triangular assembely. The short folded ends are the tabs, and the slots are along the center fold from step one.

With a slight modification, of the fourth step, the same basic design can be used to create a cube with twelve units. This is basically the same as Valerie Vann's 12 Biz Card Open Face Cube that I later found diagrams for at archive.org.

Using this unit to create a cube also requires a little adjustment of the tabs to get them to fit nicely, which I accomplished with a simple reverse fold.

This unit can be used to make a tetrahedron (6 units), an octahedron (12 units), and an icosahedron (30 units). The first two are fairly stable, the last is a little bit less stable, but still sturdy. I don't bother to try to actually tuck the tab on the last unit, as things are too constricted by that point.

I have made the following with variations of this unit:

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Malachi B-J Brown malachus+spencerandbrown@gmail.com