We’ve gone metric!
Idea
Since the pop-up mechanisms are usually small, I’ve usually used metric for all the measurements when building them. However, the overall card size has been 4½” x 6”, which I somehow standardized on over the years. For this card, I decided to go fully metric and make the pop-up celebrate that. The card is now 12 cm x 15 cm, which is very close to the old size.
My initial idea was to explain some of the metric system, showing the power of 10 as each unit increased (such as from mm, to cm, to meter). If I tried to show three units, there’s a 100 times difference in sizes. To do three squares or cubes within the card would make the smallest size tiny. After muddling around about that, I repeated myself by leaning on another set of mousy workers converting inches into metric units. You may notice these workers are in a cleaner environment, and wearing safety gear.
Design
The main movement in this is the dump truck. I wanted to have it dump inches into the hopper as the card opens. The rest of the card is mainly floating platforms layered on top of each other. Here’s the mechanism of the dump truck without the bed attached.
Dumping inches
The sketch worked pretty well, but in the final version the bed pulled up and collided with the banner at the top. To solve both of those issues I attached a small piece of card to the top of the bed so that it would go behind the banner, avoiding the collision, and not lifting up.
For the Covert-o-matic I had the conveyors in early sketches. I tried to show inches and centimeters randomly on coming out of the top as if there were being grinded up. It didn’t look very good, so I decided to go for a couple gears (again stealing from the December card). This is the only other interesting part of the card. The Covert-o-matic is a floating plane with conveyors and gear floating planes attached to it.
Here is a top view. Blue is the Covert-o-matic with the red center support. The yellow conveyors are attached to it. The green rear gear is attached to the conveyors, and the orange front gear is attached to the front of the Covert-o-matic.
A simpler card and shorter blog than last month, but I hope you enjoyed them. You may notice what may appear to be random numbers on the card.
- The truck’s 1.6 is the number of miles in a kilometer
- The sign’s 254 corresponds to 25.4 mm in an inch
- The
Covert-o-matic’s 2.2 is the number of pounds in a kilogram
Cover
Pretty simple cover this time, just showing the metric dimensions and a visitor.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- Everything was cut by hand aside from the gears and the banner at the top.
- The base and inner mechanism were Michael’s cardstock
- The illustrations were done using PrismaColor pencils and Pitt Artist Pens