Small Stellated Dodecahedron - Laser Cut

thingiverse

I wanted to create a Small Stellated Dodecahedron (small being part of the technical name, to distinguish from the Great Stellated Dodecahedron). There are lots of papercraft versions as well as 3D print versions, but I'm a big fan of laser cutting and I couldn't find any laser cut ones. I had two prior attempts which didn't work very well - but this one went together pretty easy with wood glue. I used 1/8" birch plywood. The joints are a little loose, so I'm going to try to make it fit together more snugly in my next run. I'll update if it works well! The design file needs to be cut 3 times to get all the parts. The whole thing can be cut from a 12"x12" piece of material. How I Designed This I used Wikipedia to look up geometry information about the Small Stellated Dodecahedron, and decided on a strategy using intersecting pentagrams. The trickiest part was getting the connecting pieces right (the intersection angle is 116.565 degrees) - the rest is just pentagons and triangles. Designed in DraftSight, prepared in Inkscape, cut on a Full Spectrum 80W Laser Cutter at Make 717 in Lancaster, PA.