Plywood Icosahedron with Lights and the Other 4 Platonic Solids! 2026

Plywood Icosahedron with Lights and the Other 4 Platonic Solids, the icosahedron is my favorite and quite difficult to make, so this is how I made it and with this method you can make dodecahedron and octahedron too. Hexahedron, also known as cube, is easy to make, anyway, while tetrahedron is a different story because its dihedral angle is smaller than 90 degrees, I did it another way and will cover it in another order.

All the tools you need are a table saw, miter saw, and an angle gauge. Platonic solids are made up of regular polygons, so all you need to do is make the right number of them and calculate the dihedral angle, which is 2 times the edge bevel angle.

Step 1: Construction and calculation

An icosahedron has 20 equilateral triangles, with a dihedral angle of 138.189685°, meaning that each triangle must have 3 edges with bevels of (138.189685°/2) ≈ 69.1°

It is also important to know the size of the final piece you want to calculate the diameters of the pieces. I made several versions of different sizes and thicknesses of the edges. The smallest one in the picture is approx. 12″ diameter with 7″ long and 3/4″ wide edges (the problem with this one is that the triangle hole is too small for me to put my hand inside the geometry to do any kind of finishing or decoration). one as you can see the size in the comparison, is made from 2 sheets of 3/4″ plywood glued together. For more information, see Regular icosahedron dimensions.

Step 2: Preparation of the wood and bevel cutting

I will use the largest icosahedron as an example for the following steps.

• First glue 2 sheets of 3/4″ plywood to a 1.5″ board and let them dry: simple and regular step.
• Bevel the table saw blade to 69.1° (or 20.9°, I don't know how to describe it exactly, see the diagram.) It's best to make the angle smaller if you're not confident in the accuracy of your angle gauge. I'll explain it later.
• Cut the 1.5″ sheet into bars the cross section of the bars should be parallelogram. Theoretically, the width of each cut doesn't matter, but I'd say it feels good to make it 1/2 – 1/4 the thickness for a good balance between weight and tensile strength.

In this icosahedron we need 20 triangles with 60 edges. My board is about 36″, so I decided to make the border 12″, so I only need to cut 20 bars, or 21, 22…

Step 3: Miter

Cut one end of the bars at 60º (which on most miter saws is the maximum and can only turn one side, some smaller saws can go as high as 45º so they won't work). Since the parallelogram is centrosymmetric,You can start the cut from any side.

Turn the bar upside down and cut it in 1/3, you will get a trapezoid, turn it and cut again for another trapezoid, turn again and cut the end piece. Make sure you have more than 60 pieces.

Arrange the piece like corrugated cardboard and use a miter saw to trim the end, make sure they are the same length. I used masking tape and grouped them into 4s for each cut.

Step 4: Make triangles

Glue 3 bars to a triangle. Find a large, flat workbench, use masking tape instead of clamps to hold the form while the glue is drying. I forgot to take pictures of the triangles, but the pentagons are the same idea 🙂

Step 5: Test setup

Simply attach one triangle to another, if all went well you would get a perfectly fitted icosahedron with no effort. If not, the highest possibility is inaccurate bezel as shown in the last image. That's why I said it's better to cut the bevel smaller if it's uncertain. Fortunately, wood is flexible enough to tolerate a little error.

Remove the tape and sand the surface.

Step 6: Assembly

Glue the triangles together and secure with tape as the last step.

Step 7: Final Result

Clean up excess glue, use natural colored wood filler and sand again, seal with wood finish.

I also had some painted in solid color and/or attached LED lights inside.

Get more information at Perfectidea.com and on our Facebook for more Plywood Icosahedron with Lights and the Other 4 Platonic Solids.

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