Caotan Pham: Pepakura Geometric Unfolding

I decided to make a desktop because almost every aspect of our lives revolves around this piece of equipment. It is such an intricate part of daily life, if it was removed from reality this instant, several sides of our first world society would come to a standstill. Also, the redundancy of designing a computer on a computer seemed fitting somehow.

The entire model consists of three parts: the monitor, the keyboard, and the cpu. After designing all three, I moved them into Pepakura to be unfolded.

I then took it into Illustrator and exported into Rhino to manually fix up the lines and tabs. The neck of the monitor split in a weird position in Pepakura, so I redrew the parts. Additionally, the tabs connecting the neck and the base seemed too small and excessive, so I combined them into larger tabs.

I moved them back into Illustrator for final adjustments and exporting. The desktop still looked like a box at this point, so I drew in a power button and disk drives.

The keyboard, though slightly more trapezoidal, was the same, so I added in cuts to imitate keys. For the sake of cutting time, I decided not to engrave a grid into the top, and instead cut small crosses.

Here they are after the laser. I cut them onto mounting board, which is similar to cardboard, but without the corrugated paper in the middle. Unfortunately, this material did not cut as well, because higher strengths began to burn the paper, instead of cutting through. This meant that I had to go through and, with a knife, cut the parts which the laser could not cut through.

Here the monitor is having its final tabs glued shut. I used painter's tape to hold the edges together. For the monitor, I messed up and built the whole base and neck parts individually and then attempted to fit the neck inside after they had dried, instead of assembling the neck, and then building the base and screen around it. That was a lesson learned.

Here is the finished keyboard. You may be able to see the slight trapezoidal form. Also, while assembling, I noticed that the burn marks on the cardboard were meant to be on the inside, with dashed lines being valley folds, and dotted dashed lines being mountain folds, but I wanted the marks on the outside, so I reversed the folds.

Here is the cpu. It's size proved to be a challenge for the tabs to keep together while the glue dried. The drive cutouts and the power button turned out great.

Here is the monitor. It looked balanced in the 3d model, but as I was assembling it, I was worried it wouldn't stand up. It did, however. The neck holds up fine, and it doesn't tip, which is good.

Here are all three pieces together. It looks a lot more like the real thing than expected. This project was fun, and became some sort of a tribute to my computer habits. Bringing something digital, breaking it down, and bringing it into the physical realm was a good experience.