How to make business card cubes
Created 3 June 2003, last updated 27 January 2007
Making cubes out of business cards is easy, and will impress your friends!
What you will need
Everything you need is already at hand:
- Six business cards, and
- About five minutes.
In the figures here, the cards are pictured as having a white side and a gray side, and the cube ends up white on the outside. You’ll have to decide how you’ll use your own cards to determine the look of your cube. I’ll describe white as the “outside”, and gray as the “inside”.
Creating the pieces
The first step is to fold the cards into pieces suitable for assembling into a cube:
- Take two cards, and place them across each other, with the inside faces together. Try to make the 90-degree angle between them as accurate as possible, because each card serves as a guide for the folds in the other. Getting the two cards to cross precisely in the center is not important, since the tab lengths can vary without affecting the final cube.
- Fold the ends of the bottom card up over the top card. Make the folds nice and crisp: the crisper the fold, the snugger the final cube will be.
- Flip the pair over so that the bottom folded card becomes the top card.
- Fold the other card’s ends up.
- Pull the two cards apart: you’ve made two cube pieces. If you’ve made the folds tight, the pieces will be more “closed up” than shown here, that’s good.
- Do steps 1 through 5 two more times. Now you have six cube pieces. You are ready to begin assembly.
Assembling the pieces
Now that you have six cube pieces, you can assemble them into a cube. This requires a little bit of dexterity, but is not as hard as it might seem.
At each step, make sure that the new card you’re adding to the cube is hugging the existing cards with its folded tabs. Again, the pictures show the tabs flared out a bit so you can see the structure, but if you have made sharp folds, the tabs will lie flat against the other cards, making a nice clean cube.
At the last step, you will need to carefully pry open the remaining tabs to get the last card in properly (under the other cards’ tabs, but with its tabs over its neighbors).
Another set of instructions
If you want more detailed illustrations, here’s a tabblo I made of the process:
What next?
Now that you’ve made your cube, there are other things you can do:
- You can make more cubes.
- You can make six more cube pieces, and carefully attach them over the six sides of your cube to get a nice tab-less look. The tabs of the new piece are folded completely under the tabs beneath it.
- You can interlock the tabs from two cubes to attach them, and build from there.
- You can get 66,048 cards together, and make a depth 3 Menger’s sponge.
- You can make a movie starring your cubes.
- You can try fancier shapes!
- You can try another five-minute project: How to make coffee stirrer stars.
- You can read the New York Times article featuring this page.
- You can read my blog, where other similar topics are discussed.
Comments
The International Business Card Collector
IBCCsite.com
Level 3 here I come!
i want you to be my father!
Harvard. Weiner Rules.
- Jerilyn's mom
This is the coolest thing since sliced bread. You can use these things for x-mas decorations, desk decorations, or a good waste of 30 minutes to 1 hour at the office while everyone makes business card cubes!
However, have the smoker take a puff and then gently blow smoke into the box thru the hole you've cut out. Then, gently tap the side of the box with a finger, and a perfect smoke ring will issue from the hole. Sometimes you can get several from one fill of the box.
Have you also considered the Origami jumping frog? Another use for a rectangular card. (3x5 index cards work great, but business cards can work too.) Cheers!
IBCC member # 260
Does anybody know how to assemble a cube from 6 squares of folded paper?
Each piece has "hands" and "pockets" and the hands fit into the pockets of the adjacent piece.
Please post the answer, or email to nomorejunkfood@kooee.com.au
Thanks.
sorry my email is mm_mabs@yahoo.com
oh yeah: to those who commented on how sucky this site is and how we are time wasters by coming to this site- FYI! YOU'RE HEAR TOO, RIGHT? AND TO KNOW IF THIS SITE SUCKED OR NOT, YOU'D HAVE TO READ IT ALL TOO, SO YOU'RE 'WASTING TIME' TOO. get a life. geez.
http://www.geocities.com/dnehen/soma/soma.htm
Thanks for the idea!
I hope this is useful to you all.
Chris
`~tom~`
http://www.printsmadeeasy.com
Happy New Year!
Teri
keep getting it
If you or any one else have cards they want to get rid of send them to me. Ill give them a good home. I collect them ALL!!!! Email me puckett10@hotmail.com for my snail mail address. THANK YOU..
Como sou brasileira, praticamente não entendo quase nada em inglês, mas consigo captar pelas imagens. Parabens mesmo. Um beijo no coração de todos. Atenciosamente,Luciana Rodrigues de Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brasil
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with the fold going up, down to make a shape like this when viewed from the side:
/\
/ \
/ \
____/ \
place that over the first flat card into the same edge.
then fold 4 other cards' edges at an angle and insert them into the cube so th ey are like legs. the resulting creature looks somewhat like this from the side:
/\
_______/__\___
| |
/| |\
/ |_______| \
/__/ \_\
im 11, but my dad owns a shop. i put it in his shop. he said it was cool, but a waste of buisiness cards.:)
:(
oh well. of you follow the written directions, you can still get it.
for the second card thats folded, fold it into a mountain with a flap out to the side to place into the cube.
!
Today I posted an entry on my blog with a link to this tutorial.
Would you let me know if that's OK?
Thanks,
Nancy Ward
http://paperfriendly.blogspot.com
I actually turned my cube into a 5 sided box with the extra cards on the outside (the "more finished look" which is also more stable)... it's awesome.
The full title is:
What to do and how to do it; the American boys handy book
by Beard, Daniel Carter, 1850-1941
Publication date 1920
Publisher New York, C. Scribner's sons
It is available online, open access, It has a whole chapter devoted to "The Universe in a Card-Box, Chapter XL, p. 368-71. with diagrams.
PDF here:
https://ia800501.us.archive.org/24/items/whattodohowtodoi00bear/whattodohowtodoi00bear_bw.pdf
I'm really curious to know where Jeannine Mosely learned the model -- or did she create it independently?
And how far back does the model go? If it was a traveling salesman's trick by 1920, it surely was created well before that.
For teaching the Business Card Cube to origami novices, consider using colored index cards in pairs. Easier to fold and manipulate, easier to see the symmetries.
Karen 6/8/2018
(yes, I am one of the janitors of the internet)
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