The Giant Jacob's Ladder Room Divider!

A Jacob's Ladder is a toy with a bunch of squares connected with hinges. Simple, right? WRONG. A Jacob's Ladder can flip all of its squares individually, allowing it to reach some mind-boggling configurations.

So I thought, what if I made a room divider in the shape of a GIANT Jacob's Ladder? It would be so fun to maneuver!

In this Instructable, I will show you how to make your very own Jacob's Ladder Room Divider, which can be folded and flipped into a wide variety of shapes, and even flip its sides!

(1)   Cardboard

If you have a large piece of cardboard cardboard, each enough to serve as 1 panel, you only need 8 for an 8-panel room divider. In my case, I didn't have the appropriate size, so we used 24 18”x12”x12” cardboard boxes (12” wide and 30” tall when flattened out). 16 for the base, 8 for the top.

(2)   Duct tape. 

(3)   Transparent packing tape.

(4)   Double H-Frame yard sign holder (10”x30”) for support as needed. You will not need this if you have a sheet of cardboard large enough to be an entire panel.

(5)   Decorative paper (could be leftover wallpaper, gift wrapping paper, or any other material you would like to decorate the room divider)

(6)   Thin plastic sheets. We used 6 Mil Clear Mylar Stencil Sheets

(7)   Optional: Electric cardboard cutters might come in handy as you will need to do a LOT of cutting.

We are making 8 panel room dividers. Each board (flattened box as shown)is 30"x12". Since each cardboard piece is not tall enough for room divider, we are going to have base panels and top panels.

We are using 16 boards to make 8 base panels, and 8 for top panels. Each base panel uses two boards to provide a stable support. Each top panel only needs one cardboard. Altogether, this requires 24 cardboard boxes.  

To decorate, for the boards for base panels, we only need to decorate one side of each board (then we put front and back board together to form a panel); for the top panel, we need to decorate both sides. 

In our case, we simplify by using the same wall papers to cover the base boards. Feel free to come up with your own design. It will be interesting to make designs that work out for different layout of the final room divider so that the look varies depending on the layout.

Since we are going to work on 16 base boards, we made a template as shown to indicate where to put on the connection tape. Typical Jacob ladder has 3 tapes to connect, two connecting from one direction and the other connects from the opposite direction. See one specification here for a traditional Jacob ladder that has a really nice 3-D model! https://belsnickle.blogspot.com/2017/08/diy-jacobs-ladder-toy-for-christmas.html

Our panel needs 5 connections to secure (in an X shape), and we use 3 tapes in one way (in the \ direction) and 2 tapes in the other (the / direction) for connecting. The template is made such that the space in between the tapes is reasonably evenly spaced. 

Start by putting two boards together into a pair of connected boards like in a Jacob's Ladder.

Start by preparing tapes. We need 5 pieces of tape to connect every two boards. Our board is 1’ wide.  We cut two pieces of duct tape, each of length about 18”. Tape the two together with the overlapping part between 13”-14” and overlapping end part about equal length. If your board is of different width, you will need to adjust the length of the tapes so that the overlapping part should be of a little over the width of the box (this way when it wraps around, the tape won’t stick to unintended parts of the boards). 

Put one base panel board facing down (the side decorated touching the floor). Lay and press 3 tapes to the right as shown. Lay and press 2 tapes to the left.

Flip the board over carefully. Swing the tapes to the cross the board as shown.

Carefully lay down the 2^nd board facing down. Use the template to help stick the tapes on with board secured tightly as shown.

Repeat to make a total of 7 pairs. Leave two boards from front and back cover.

Put all 7 pairs together, then add the front and back cover board. Note that when you look from the side of the board, you should see the pieces of tape aligns well (i.e., from one side, you see three tapes from each board and from the other side, you see two tapes from each board).

Connect every two pairs by taping together the top and bottom of each pair of the board, with the decorated side of the board exposed while and the undecorated sides stuck together.

Now we complete the base!

Poke one hole on top of each box in base panels so that it aligns with the corresponding poles of each Double H-Frame yard sign holder.

Cut a 10” opening at the bottom of each top panel so that you can slid in the H-Frame sign holder.

The top panels, now, though installed onto the base, can still be a little bit unstable at the top. We need to add 7 Jacob-ladder style bindings to stabilize these as shown.

To create one such pair of bindings: First cut thin plastic sheets into strips of two 2”x24” and two 1”x12”. Tape the two ends of the 24” long strip together to make a loop. Make two loops. Connect the two 1”x12” strip in “X” manner as shown. This makes a pair of two connected loops. Slid it onto two panels next to each other.

Repeat to create 7 such connected loop pairs and install onto the top panels.

Refer to the video to see some ideas on how to manipulate this giant Jacob's Ladder room divider. Have fun!