David Rysdam

Very confusing paperweight (if it was thick enough), May 13 2004

After reading Tomoko Fuse's excellent book on Unit Origami I wanted to get a little farther into it. This books seemed a good place to start. It is not.

On the plus side, there are many, many models in the book. Also, there seems to be some fundamental "theory" that generates them, which would allow a great deal of flexibility and range of design to anyone who used it.

On the negative side, I can't for the life of me figure out how to make even a single model. The whole first 3/4 of the book consists of things like this: A line drawing of a polyhedron labelled, for instance, "Rhombicuboctahedron" and then a photo of an origami pice that doesn't seem related… Read more

Great book...for the right person, Mar 28 2004

The first half of the book is mostly text and reminds me of Godel, Escher, Bach (by Douglas Hofstadter) but for origami. I would like to see this half expanded out into a full book.

The second half is beautiful, intricate models such as the hummingbird, the octopus and the reindeer. I've been folding for about 6 months and I could tell just looking at the folding instructions that the later models like the crab were too hard. What I didn't realize was that even the relatively simple hummingbird is difficult.

At first I thought the folding instructions were unclear (and the hummingbird does have a typo, you should start with the butterfly fish instructions, not the angelfish ones)… Read more

Misleading title, disappointing content, Feb 1 2003

First and most damning, there is only one (of 16 total designs) Stirling engine design in this book. Second, from things I had read on the Internet, I had gathered that the designs ran from "build with hand tools" to "need a home machine shop". In reality there's no spectrum here. There is one design (for a steam engine) that can be built with hand tools, everything else needs machine tools.

If machine-tooled steam engines is your thing, I'm sure this book is great. For someone wanting to build hand-tooled (possibly building up to machine-tooled) Stirlings, it's useless.