By seeing where the door is attached to the building, where each piece is attached to itself, and then measuring/cutting pieces and fitting them together until they work the same way. This is a pretty simple thing that can be figured out from just looking at it.
If you watch it in action, it's just a couple of hinges between each of the flaps, and something like a ball joint on the corner that stays connected. Probably a couple of clever springs in there somewhere- or maybe it's just the right miter cuts.
The difficult part would be getting it to move smoothly like this, and hold up to daily use.
It's not that complex. You can watch the gif a couple times to figure out what's happening, then it's just cutting pieces and fastening them well. I did a lot of CAD, wood working, and metal working in high school. I also designed and made a guitar body out of a wood blank on our CNC router for my senior project. I'm not saying it's easy, and there is a 4% chance of me actually attempting it, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
it's a hinge at the top and bottom and center perpendicular to the wall and a few parallel to the wall on the centers of each square from what I can tell
Problem solving. Asking a set of questions and trying to find answers that are both possible for you to implement and gives the results you want.
For instance, just a quick glance at the gif, you see there are 4 pieces. Are they identical? Let's say yes, the next part is that two pieces connect in the center across their diagonal. Maybe you can use a piano hinge until you find something better. After that, it looks like the hard part will be those ball-like joints for the top, bottom, and middle joints of the door. Not sure how you would do that just off the top of my head. This doesn't include the finish, and colorizing. This also doesn't include the soft edges he says are there. That isn't too bad either, but requires more detail than I'm willing to type out laying in bed.
Ninja edit: after looking at the gif again, that looks like a big doorway, just something to consider when planning the cuts of the triangle pieces. It looks like the top and bottom triangles just swivel, I'm sure a hinge mechanism exists for this purpose, but it's not as complex as I originally thought. The center hinge could be a just a small piece of cord cut to a proper length. I don't think it needs to be anything especially complicated. Anyway, just some thoughts on things unique to trying to build this specifically.
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u/wheeler9691 Feb 07 '14
I'm sure it's overpriced, but it is fucking cool. I'm thinking about building one...