Click the pic for another great stick bomb.
Fun project for the weekend: play with physics and patterns! This is a cobra-weave stick bomb, which makes a huge loud racket that kids will doubtless love and cats will doubtless hate. I found these very much by accident a couple weeks ago when I was looking up methods of knot-tying for a client project. Here’s the Wikipedia page on these suckers; use what you read here to find more.
These stick bombs are simple structures made of rigid objects woven together in a way that ensures each successive repetition of the pattern relies upon the integrity of the previous pattern. So, by that logic, if you make the first pattern unstable, the next one will become unstable, and so on. And that means: an awesome chain reaction. Fun to construct, fun to destroy, and totally reusable. That’s a fancy way of saying “house of cards, waiting to fall.”
Here’s a great video of a kid blowing his up, and letting loose the most infectious delighted squeal I’ve ever heard.