Delta blocks were inspired by M.C. Escher's print "Flatworms" (Left) M.C. Escher's Flatworms ©2002 Cordon Art B.V. - Baarn - Holland. All rights reserved. Used with permission

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Escher's print demonstrates that one can build a house
not only with our usual right angled bricks but also with tetrahedrons alternated with octahedrons.
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Below are my first bricks which didn't work well.
They don't stack like rectangular blocks, but slide off each other's sloping sides.
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My solution was an array of holes and pegs on each face.
These face to face connectors worked well (below).
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However, these would be difficult and expensive to manufacture.
An ordinary two-part mold would catch on the holes and pegs.
Since they aren't hollow, like Legos (TM) they would require more material.
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Below is my solution to these problems.
These blocks can be made with ordinary two part molds.
They store in a small fraction of the space occupied by the assembled bricks
and they require only a fraction of the materials to manufacture.
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Tet panel stereolithography file
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Oct panel stereolithography file
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Units should be millimeters
These panels are intended to have an edge length of 72 millimeters
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Hop's Pages:

Tessellating Blocks Blocks that tessellate have the power to approximate any shape.

Escher Tiles. These are some Escher like Tessellations that I have made.

Ram's Horn. A ram's horn spiral plus some spiral tessellations.

Truncated Octahedron Blocks This discusses a three dimensional tessellation that may make a good bridge between the rectangular solid tessellation and the octa/tetrahedral tessellation.

Buckminster Fuller's Octetruss This page briefly discusses Buckminster Fuller's invention based on the octahedron/tetrahedron tessellation. For more on Fuller please go to the Links to Other Folks Pages page.

Other Escher Ideas
Escher Perspective Study This page discusses an Escher observation on perspective. This page features one of my drawings which is a 400K file. May take a little while to download.

Escher Dyson Sphere To me this print by Escher looks like a Dyson Sphere! I wonder what he would have thought of this bizarre interpretation.

Curl-Ups as Robots? I asked a Dutch friend to translate the Escher print "Curl Ups". His comments suggest Curl Ups as robots. His translation and comments are on this page.

Miscellaneous
Fractals from Kepler's Solids This page discusses a fractal idea I had. Chaim Goodman-Strauss has also come up with this independently, we only recently discovered each other's work. If you want to see Chaim's Dodecafoam, check out the Dodecafoam link on my Links To Other Folks Pages page.

Double Tetrahedron Fractal. A three dimensional  version of the double triangle fractal. This model is incomplete and not very well done. However, I think it suggests an likable family of fractals. This family has an interesting connection with the golden mean.

Some thoughts on Christianity

Links To Other Folk's Pages This is an indeed motley assortment of pages. Lots of good stuff!

Hop's Personal Page A page about me.

Ajo Copper News. Our business, a weekly newspaper

Gabrielle's page My sister's page

My family - This site on my family's geneology and various members was done by Gabrielle.