Friday, February 21, 2014

crimp mechanism

I drew this just for you because I sensed the intense interest.

This takes advantage of a bit of origami. You know, how the crane's neck and tail are formed, how moving the tail can make the wings flap.

The mechanism is a simple strip built into the card as a step using tabs that are not shown here, a crimp put into the step. Strange and unexpected things happen depending on which side of the crimp the arm is glued. One side slides content nicely in 90 degree arc, the other side flips it into the 90 degree position more dramatically. I am talking about the two sides of the crimp, the two tiny triangles formed by a crimp, that is where the action is. Additionally, the crimp itself naturally aims in one direction or another placed on the edge of the step, not just the step up edge when the card is in the half-opened position, but top edge of the band and the bottom edge of the band, the crimp needn't be placed exactly on the top or bottom edge, it can be moved in away from the edge enabling the direction of arc movement to reverse.


I put two crimps in a band formed into a step, the arms aiming in opposite directions, one arm up the other arm down, then in the style of overlapping discs with un-exact centers, attached a dung beetle to one arm covering the whole step and a large circle of dung on the other. Both only move 90 degrees but added together the movements make 180 degrees and that is considerable movement for a pop-up card, and it looks for all the world like a beetle pushing a ball of dung, in cartoon form.

The idea of crimping a corner is not limited to a step. Little pieces of triangular paper can be added in places to form a crimp, or to behave as a crimp. This is just a way of illustrating how crimps work. It can do things like lift a meerkats fingers to its ears, or lift a mortar rifle to its shoulder to knock a bird out of the sky. It can lift a bunch of flowers or put sunglasses on. They can lift things right off the page, they can make a net come down on a frog. They can do jumping jacks. 

1 comment:

deborah said...

I assume you did this with your coiling snake card? Very impressive.