How to Stack Playing Cards | WIRED

in a recent episode of obsessed we saw Brian Berg build an eight-foot-tall spaceship out of cards with nothing holding it together except good design and he made it look easy but how easy is it Berg is gonna give us a quick lesson on the basics like how to use your hands as tools and what shape to start with once you master those simple skills you can use them to build pretty much anything and I'm here to show you how to turn ordinary playing cards into something amazing first step here's a list of don'ts you're not gonna want to try to do this on shag carpet you're not gonna want to try to do it maybe on glass something that has a little more texture to it just a normal tabletop also don't try it outside don't try it in front of a fan don't do it in a moving vehicle those things are all problematic to build your foundation berg advises against the traditional triangle shape instead he starts with squares and right angles I'm gonna hold the first card in my left hand he's gonna Park it here so it's really hard but you got to remember not until you've got all four of these cards put together are you gonna let go there's the fourth card I'm still wiggling but look I'm just gonna lean all four of those together this is a little sloppy each one of them is leaning in notice each one is at the halfway point and notice that I've created a little box in the center that's this is the fundamental beginning cell of any card house from small to massive if you can accomplish this little box and get that to happen you're really like 90% of the way there but I'm just gonna keep making these little boxes and as I go this will kind of turn into what I call the grid he has a couple extra little tips to get you from the first story to the second to the third fourth fifth however tall you want to go I'm just gonna quickly throw a little roof on this you're really just trying to get the most even roofing that you can that isn't you know five cards thick in one place and one card thick in another in the very center so imagine it getting thicker and thicker and thicker in the middle but not so much on the edges you're gonna create this dome effect on your roof and what that's gonna cause is your cards to dance around they're not gonna want to sit but you'll notice I did put the numbers up the numbers are up because typically playing cards are sort of shaped like this and that means that every card kind of creates two contact points and that that cards just gonna want to sit there all right if it were like this that card is gonna want to dance around when you put all these steps together you have endless options of what you can build and you'll be surprised at how strong your card houses are and to prove it Berg is gonna build another grid and then stress test it okay so we're gonna build the same grid we built before I'm gonna use two or three cards at a time to just kind of beef up the strength of this thing a little bit and you could do it with one card you know depending on what you want to do with this thing I double them up triple them up a lot to just make it more of a brick house less of a card house so that when the clumsiest person in a room is moving around which is me and I get too close to it that you know just the slightest draft doesn't cause it to start to fall apart these larger structures becomes really strong so you might have something sitting around that you can use to stress test your house of cards so in this case I just happen to have a concrete block sitting here and I'm just gonna set it out there do we have another one don't have another one

Channel: WIRED

Views: 570,532

Rating: 4.8762136 out of 5

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Id: 5F6j4e1C4Zk

Length: 4min 36sec (276 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020