Paper Project Prototyping!

 

Prototyping Paper Projects

    I began modelling the carabiner in Rhino, and it soon became clear that an exact replica would be very hard if not impossible to unroll and fold back up properly. 

    

    I decided the profile of the carabiner would have to be more "pixelated" so as to provide a clean fold. This meant the profile had to be geometric. I explored a rectangular and hexagonal profile, as shown below, using the "extrude along curve" tool.  

    This tool didn't quite work out, as the extrusion wasn't a uniform thickness along the curve. Eventually, I used sweep1 tool and that worked much better with a square profile. I built the carabiner and shaped the profile for where the gate would fit. Then, I divided the extrusion into five sections so that the unroll process would be neater. 

    Above, slight panic when I forgot to turn off explode before unrolling. I'm happy with the direction of this prototype. My next steps will be to create the gate and then unroll the entire object and nest it appropriately for the laser cutter. Stay tuned! :)