Cube X Grows Feet

Machine feet

I've been wondering for a long time how to make the corners of the cube pieces of the giant Soma cube for Nowhere. There needs to be some separation between the faces, so that they don't scrape against each other. There also needs to be some sort of protection of the corners themselves.

I have already built a small test cube for working out things like this, so I have been experimenting on that.

I found a company that sells machine feet and ball corners. The feet work well and even look okay, but at £5 for 12 I'd be looking at £200 worth of feet! Even buying in bulk from China, it looks like £100. Meanwhile, the ball corners looked surprisingly ugly, were slightly too small, and weren't really round enough to stop one cube piece damaging another.

Prototype tyre-based corner

My plan B was to cut up some used car tyres and nail them onto the corners. Yesterday I went looking for tyres. Tyre shops aren't open on Sundays, but I found a stack of moribund tyres outside one and that was enough to realise that they'd be far too big and heavy for this purpose. Then it dawned on me that I should have been thinking about bicycle tyres all along. And, what's more, Get a Grip Bicycle Workshop is open on Sundays. So I walked over there, picked up a bunch of old tyres and spent the afternoon cutting them up. The result is promising.

I can get about 40 strips out of each tyre. I'll need about 500 strips in total. But I've made a jig to help cut the strips, so it should only take 2-3 hours to cut all of them. It'd be even faster if I had some sort of shears or guillotine suitable for cutting rubber.

The strips of each corner can be glued together with rubber cement. Once fabricated, the completed corners can be left unattached where necessary, to permit disassembly and final assembly on site.