Donut/Torus Redesign and Upgrade

Back in September, I saw a design for a torus made of paper on the internet, and decided to take on the project. After four hours of meticulous cutting and fitting the pieces together, I came out with this. A neat feature that I discovered accidentally is that it folds flat!

Last week I was reminded of this project at Peter Mui's Fixit Clinic that was hosted by The Saturday Thing and decided to CAD the design up. Unfortunately my image-to-.dxf software didn't like the file I had for the paper torus, so I ended up making the shapes freehand in AutoCAD. This took about an hour, but time lost in design was made up in cutting time. I scaled the drawing up so the outside diameter of the torus became about 9 inches. The slots are designed for .093" acrylic, and luckily we had a big sheet on hand. To my pleasant surprise, I hadn't screwed anything up in the design and everything fit perfectly! After taking a few pictures of the clear creation, we shut off the lights in the lab, took some of the Aurora Bear bases, and lit it from below.