How I Solved The Frabjous.

Posted on November 3rd, 2009 by turrboleach

I was stumbling the other day and found this really interesting (puzzle like)sculpture on evilmadscientist called the “frabjous”. This sculpture was created by Geometric sculptor George W. Hart.

frabjous2

At first glance of the page, I just looked at it and said: “ok interesting , next site” and clicked the thumbs up on my stumble toolbar without even reading it. Days after, I went back to this site and found out that the Frabjous could be created with 30 pieces of just one pattern. I was in a bit of a mood for a challenge that night, and this sculpture seemed like it had a reasonable degree of difficulty to solve so I took a go. So I downloaded the pdf file from George Hart’s site, printed the 1 piece on paper and duplicated 30 pcs on box cardboard. After 6 hours(turns out it was a pretty good challenge after all), i had my first Frabjous:

my first frabjous

Some people might have actually solved this faster. Other people might have had a hard time trying to solve it(like me). For the second group, I’ll explain how I figured it out. I hope this helps.

The madscientist post for the Frabjous gave a short hint on how the sculpture is built. This involved using a dodecahedron parent shape and a diagram of how each piece is placed in the parent shape. The cool thing about this sculpture is that all the pieces are placed in the same way. It might sound easy, but we have to remember that the sculpture has 30 pieces and the shape is a bit complex.

The key to building it is to do it step by step. Another thing you have to remember is that each side of the parent shape creates a star on each side of the Frabjous. If you look at the star closely, you’ll see that each piece is placed one on top of the other in a clockwise manner.

multi-curve

If you want to see a more detailed explanation of this diagram, click here.

Being the stubborn person that I am, I just imagined the parent shape. What happened? I had trouble with how i was going to connect the other pieces. I looked a bit closer into how the pieces are placed and noticed 2 pentagons on top of each other. The next thing I noticed is that that the lower pentagon points could be connected to each other and form a star. Tricky? Here’s the picture:

bottom star

You now have a stable structure to start with. Now if you were able to do this first step, have read the original post from evilmadscientist, remember that each piece is placed exacly the same way and remember that the star is one on top of the other clockwise, you should be able to finish this. Remember to do it step by step. You can refer to the pictures below for the next steps but it would actually be better if you can figure it out for yourself. Have fun!

frabjous steps