sheung yee's incredible paper structures

yesterday i saw my wife and son off on a journey to london and paris. my son phoned from a telephone kiosk on a london street this morning as excited as he ever gets. had he been to see the sights? oh no. he was absolutely gushing about all the aston martins, rolls-royces, spykers and assorted other exotic cars that commonly fill the streets of the capital of my birthplace.

speaking of cars and amazing buildings brings me to today's post. origami is a magical artform that had its origins in china and eventually moved to japan in the sixth century. my own experience with origami is that it involves the precise folding of paper into little objects that sort of resemble what they are based on. more recently i have used it in my classroom after reading sadako and the thousand paper cranes, a short and beautiful story about a little girl battling leukemia. sadako was two-years-old when the atom bomb was dropped on hiroshima at the end of world war II. central to the plot of her fight against the disease was her will to fold 1000 paper cranes, which japanese legend held would prompt the gods to make her well again.

the crane is a relatively simple origami design that to be honest, i find challenging enough. so you can imagine how astonished i was when i came across the work being featured here today.

canadian paper artist sheung yee shing has been crafting paper into perfect, highly detailed models for some time now. for example, if you visit yee’s website, you can see and buy this exquisite model of notre dame which arrives like this . . . begins to unfold . . .
and ends up like this . . . which when seen closer, looks like this . . .
but yee has outdone even himself this time 'round with an unbelievable paper model of a v12 engine.

what’s truly incredible is that with the help of a couple of 1.5v double "a" batteries, each of the 12 spark plugs (leds) will be ignited according to the firing cycle. the motor comes with many moveable parts including a compound crankshaft, a cooling fan, 12 rods and 12 pistons. it is made almost entirely of paper (except for some little wooden sticks, some tape, 12 leds, some electrical wire, 12 switches, a resistor, a motor and a battery holder).

but there’s more! (sounds a lot like an infomercial but this is really good!) if you buy the engine now, yee’ll throw in the model of notre dame for free!! so if you’ve got a steady hand, tons of patience and time - yes i suspect you’ll need lots of time - then you should pile over to yee’s website and have a look ‘round.