The Origami Forum

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to get some experience with boxpleated CPs and thought that the Couatl from http://spinflipper.com/blog/?p=44 might be a nice and simple piece to try. Indeed, I could collapse it to the base, but now I have two problems:

• Consider the line of squash folds in the middle of the wings. I don't know if I collapsed them correctly, because in my base the two wing parts lie at 180 degree to each other, i.e. the wing layers go up, then at those squashs they go back down again. With this I somehow can't get something like the wings in the picture, because the two wing parts are always at an angle.
• As typical with boxpleating, the body of the couatl and it's neck consist of several layers of a mountain/valley-zigzag in the base. However, in the picture the whole thing is closed. Is there some generic way of doing this closure? Let's say say you fold a square paper with alternating valley and mountain folds into a rectangular form. From there, how do you turn it into a (seemingly) closed tube?

I hope I could make myself understood, but if not just ask and I'll try to provide more details or explain it better. Thanks for any advices.

To your second question, you have to make a lot of tiny squash folds to get the body flat, just spread the layers apart and squash the top parts.

To your first question, do you mean the inside reverse folds?

origami_8 wrote:To your second question, you have to make a lot of tiny squash folds to get the body flat, just spread the layers apart and squash the top parts.

I'll have to try some squashing to understand it I guess. How will the back of the model look like then? Is it similar to the front?

To your first question, do you mean the inside reverse folds?

Yes, kind of. I have attached the CP and highlighted the area. When I collapse that section the part left of the highlighted area and the part right of it end up next to each other with the highlighted diamonds being at the top. Maybe it's better if I get a picture of my base sometime on the weekend as I suspect I have collapsed something the wrong way here.

Here are a few pics regarding your question, the last picture shows the finished base, from there on it' only shaping.








Well and here is how I would start collapsing after making the grid:
Fold along the green lines: Note the centre doesn't lie flat.
Collapse the yellow lines next, than make some kind of Elias Stretch with the remaining blue lines along the violet lines (hope you aren't colour blind):

Dashed lines are valley on the front side of the model (coloured side up).

It's just a simple pleat, although the CP is counter intuitive to regular box pleating.

Some illustrations:

Pleat


and then box pleat like usual


beginning reverse folds

done

Wow. Thanks a lot for the detailed replies. I did indeed folded those reverse folds the wrong way. I'll try to do it all over again during the next week and now I'm pretty confident I can get it done the right way.

One more question as I'm trying to learn: Is there a way to tell from this CP, that what you have at those diamond-parts is essentially a pleat? For example those diamond-parts of the CP are also found in Lang's Cerambycid Beetle (ODS p.460) where they are collapsed totally different. Well at least I collapsed them totally different, so maybe it would have been the same there?

Hi All- Its taken me a couple of goes to fold this CP, so far I'm OK with the wings and body but I can't work out how to fold the CP that forms the head.

Can anyone explain what I'm supposed to do to get to the stage shown in the photos? i.e. collapse the head....

Thanks in advance.