The Clock, the Paper and the Wardrobe

Article by Anna Kastlunger & Gerwin Sturm

(Click on pictures for bigger version)

It all started with... a wardrobe... a wardrobe at Anna's place to be more exact. No... we didn't use the wardrobe to enter the land of Narnia but we found those nice 70cm x 2m rolls of gift wrapping paper in it. And this paper turned out to be Kraftpaper.

Now we had a very hard decision ahead of us. What should we do with this nice paper? But we came to a conclusion pretty quick (it took us about 5 seconds): we're gonna fold Robert Lang's Black Forest Cuckoo Clock, yay!

1st Task - Cutting the Paper

After choosing the paper we wanted to use - Anna took the green one with stars, Gerwin chose the red one with christmas trees - our first task was to get the paper into the right size.

Taking the necessary 1:10 ratio of paper and the length of 2m of our paper in consideration, we decided that we needed a 20cm strip of paper each. We came up with a very nice and easy technique to cut the paper.

1. Leave the paper in the form of a roll and make sure that the edges are aligned.
2. Make a small mark at the desired position (20cm from one end for us).
3. Wrap a sheet of paper around the roll (again with the borders aligned) and tape it together so it won't open.
4. Use this sheet of paper as a ruler to cut the roll at the desired position with a sharp knife.

Cutting the paper.	The finished rolls...	...unrolled.

As you can see on the 3rd picture above we were lucky to have a table which was (almost) long enough for the entire sheets of paper.

And then on Sunday, the 20th of November 2005 at around 5pm, we started our long, long folding session.

2nd Task - Precreasing

About a million necessary precreases packed into 18 steps... luckily our counting skills were (almost) advanced enough to make sure the creases ended up where they are supposed to be.

Steps 1-5 - The paper was very, very long.
The moment of truth Yes! We cutted the paper correctly!	And... unfold completely...

Folding the paper into sixteenths along the long side was really fun.
Pre-precreasing done.	And after adding some more vertical, horizontal and diagonal creases the precreasing was done.

3rd Task - Collapsing, more collapsing, and some more collapsing for a change...

Now we were finally ready to start folding the cuckoo clock.

They look like martians, cute, aren't they?

Half of the model is collapsed, and they still look cute.
Collapsing the other side as well.
Finally the model was "flat" again... hmmm... the clock shows the wrong time...

4th Task - How are those steps supposed to work...?

Since some people seem to have troubles with steps 113-117 (and we have to admit we struggled with them for a while as well) here's a detailed description of how those steps are supposed to work.

Step 113: Those two folds really lie on existing creases so DON'T make any new creases.

Step 114:
1. First add the valley folds shown in the diagrams to make the model look like this:

2. Now comes the important part. Open the edges from the INSIDE and NOT from the outside.

3. Then push in the sides of the model from the OUTSIDE.

4. You should get something like this:

5. And the same again on the other side, open from the inside, push in from the outside.

Step 115: Open the layers from the outside to get this:

Step 116: This step is like step 114 but the other way round. Push the edges you just opened from the OUTSIDE further apart, and push in from the INSIDE.

Step 117: This step should be pretty straighforward. Just push in the sides to make the model flat again.

5th Task - The finishing steps

After those steps there are only about 100 steps to go, so we were more than halfway through already.

The cuckoo clock is starting to take form.

Almost there...

12 hours later... The finished Cuckoo Clocks

And after 12 hours of almost continuous folding except for some breaks for food and toilet, that is around 5am in the morning, we had our finished Black Forest Cuckoo Clock's in the hands.

It has been a really nice experience to be folding the cuckoo clocks together. So... get some people together, grap some rolls of paper and start folding some cuckoo clocks.

Now... what will we do with the rest of the nice paper...