The business card companion cube

A few years ago, I ran across Ned Batchelder’s instructions for making a business card cube. Since then, I have made dozens of them, including a few conjoined cubes that form Tetris pieces. It occurred to me the other day (about a year or two too late to hit the Portal craze and at least 6 months too early for the Portal 2 craze), that it would be fun to make a Weighted Companion Cube version of the business card cube.

By printing the Business Card Companion Cube PDF file on cardstock and cutting on the heavy lines, you will end up with six “business cards” that look like companion cube faces. You will need either 12 Companion Cube faces, or if you happen to have some spare business cards hanging around, you can get away with 6 regular business cards and 6 Companion Cube business cards. Due to the colors of the innermost layer of business cards that form the cube, the results look a little better if you stick with 12 Companion Cube cards.

This is me, half-way through scoring and folding each of the “business card” faces:

Assemble the base cube according to Ned Batchelder’s instructions. This will use up your first six cards and results in a cube with a bunch of unsightly flaps:

Next, use your remaining 6 Companion Cube “business cards” to cover each face. For each flappy cube face, take one of the facade cube face cards and fold its flaps entirely behind the flappy cube face’s flaps. This will completely cover up each of the flappy cube faces with a Companion Cube image, giving you a finished cube:

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Brian Enigma

Brian Enigma is a Portlander, manipulator of atoms & bits, minor-league blogger, and all-around great guy. He typically writes about the interesting “maker” projects he's working on, but sometimes veers off into puzzles, software, games, local news, and current events.

One thought on “The business card companion cube”

  1. There’s a similar cube design that I’m familiar with that is built from three strips of paper, dimensioned at 1 face by 5 faces. But it does not answer the question “what do I do with all these leftover business cards?”.

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