About

Dr. Kiwano’s Geodesic Deathtraps are a spin-off of The 5 cubes sculpture project. The first deathtrap, named Miss Scott, was originally built as phase one of 5 cubes (and has been retired as a deathtrap, since enough others have been built to go ahead with subsequent phases). People simply had too much fun playing on/with it for it to be acceptable to convert it into anything other than a deathtrap until more were built. So more have been built (and continue to be built).

Differences between Miss Scott and the current deathtraps

Miss Scott’s size was determiend by how much EL wire could be run off a single driver, while the newer deathtraps are made in different sizes. Specifically, the struts from which Miss Scott was assembled are 4’6″ long. The conduit from which these struts are formed though, comes in 10′ lengths, which meant that there was a bunch of scrap, and that assembling Miss Scott required extra cuts that wouldn’t have been necessary if the struts lengths had divided evenly into 10′. Based on this, deathtraps currently come in 2 sizes: grown-up-sized (5′ struts) and kid-sized (3’4″ struts). Another important difference is that Miss Scott was made out of 3/4″ conduit, which has proven to be too weak for prolonged climbing when 5′ long (though it does just fine at 3’4″). The grown-up-sized deathtraps use 1″ conduit instead, for a little extra strength (also worth noting is that the actual reason for Miss Scott’s retirement from use as a deathtrap is that her struts were starting to show enough weakening from use to pose a threat to her usability for the 5-cubes project).