# Assembling polygons



## KE6WNH (Nov 16, 2008)

Making a hexagonal frame is easy, just tilt a chop saw to 30 degrees and cut 6 sides. But for months, I've been wanting to build a set of speaker enclosures for my living room... imagine a pair of low hexagon pyramids with the tops cut off, joined base-to-base, and that's what these look like. 

They look novel, but they were a geometry nightmare which took me 7 tries to get right... that was the bad news. The good news is, now I can crank out hexagon sides without having to reset the saw for each cut, and with very little waste!

To copy my pattern:
1. Set your table saw to 40 degrees and use it to angle both edges of all your planks.
2. Use a protractor and ruler to draw 6 symmetrical radiating lines, and make marks along each line where you want the corners to be.
3. This is the tricky part... set your chop saw's tilt at 25 degrees, and swivel the bed to 20 degrees. Once you decide how long each side of your hexagon will be, you can crank them out one right after the other by flipping the board over for each cut. The only waste pieces are the butt ends of the planks.
4. Assemble the sides of your hexagon by placing the wide sides down onto the paper, using glue on the seams and pieces of masking tape to hold them together. Align the corners to your paper's hexagon points and let it dry.
5. Use pegs or biscuits to reinforce the 6 seams. What I did was nick the seams with my table saw and glue in bits of 1/8" slats to make "biscuits".
What you end up with is essentially a hexagonal bowl, and you can scale it up or down as much as you like, as long as you don't deviate from the chop saw angles. Hexagons with a different depth can be made by using different settings on the chop saw, but unless you're good at geometry, this will require some trial and error, and a few ruined pieces... same goes for making pentagons, heptagons, and other inclined polygons. Other uses for this shape include a snack bowl, lamp base, picture frame, etc... but there's nothing like having guests come over and seeing my speaker enclosures and asking me "oooh, what are those?"

I have no pics yet, but they should be a couple of weeks coming.


----------



## mics_54 (Oct 28, 2008)

is this the shape you are talking about?









not sure what it's called..it's a octahedron with the tops cut off. A decahedron of some sort with some irregualar sides


----------



## KE6WNH (Nov 16, 2008)

Yes, mine is just like that, but hexagonal. Someday I might shoot for 7-sided.


----------



## 99flhr (Oct 28, 2008)

.it's a octahedron with the tops cut off. [/quote said:


> The useless trivia term for that is "truncated":huh:


----------

