The Origami Forum

I wanted to try hex pleating cause it looks kinda neat. I have the new ODS which does a great job explaing it. I have lots of experience with box plrating.

I want to precrease the grid but im having a hard time creasing it acurately because small errors seem to multiply.

Anyway was wondering if anyone doing hex pleating has found good way to pre-crease the grid.

adonsky wrote:I wanted to try hex pleating cause it looks kinda neat. I have the new ODS which does a great job explaing it. I have lots of experience with box plrating.

I want to precrease the grid but im having a hard time creasing it acurately because small errors seem to multiply.

Anyway was wondering if anyone doing hex pleating has found good way to pre-crease the grid.

I've done a fair bit of folding hexagonal grids (Actually equilateral triangle grids, but whatever).
I haven't had too much trouble with error creeping in.
I tend to fold a big hexagon first, then fold its diagonals, fold the edges to touch the diagonals and so on halving each row until I've got the resolution of grid that I want.

The problem with that method is you dont end up with the grid points perfectly on the edge of the paper.

In ODS, Lange talks about the "magic" ratios which make the grid virtually a perfect square. I get all that I just have difficulty precreasing it accurately

Instead of precreasing the whole grid I tried to just precrease the horizontal and vertical lines. I have difficulty making creases between two points accurately, especially if on the interior of the paper.

Anyone have any good tips for precreasing acurately?? I had this problem with box pleating too but it seemed a bit easier to precrease the 45 degree folds compared to the 30 degree folds on the hex pleat.

If you're talking about making small short diagonal folds off the grid, I suggest pinching them like mountain folds, one hand on top and one underneath.

Well, no matter what a 60 degree grid won't make a perfect square since you either don't even up the heights of the triangles or you don't even up the widths since the square root of 3 is irrational. I usually divide the paper into 4ths and then fold the corners of one side down to the top and bottom 4ths. That at least gives you a perfect 60 degree angle to work with and start from. Everything else can be folded around from those points so that at least the top and bottom of the paper will have the grid points on the edge, and the side you started with will have the halves of triangles and points on the edge. I don't know that you can actually do much better than that with a square piece of paper.
One problem you will sometimes run into is the paper "curving" on you as you crease, but if you just crease at the intersections you will at least get everything converging perfectly even if you might not have a perfect straight crease inbetween. Once you are down to 32nds or 64ths that won't matter anyway.