I like making circular house of cards. One day I decided to make a circular house of cards using some of my Moo visiting cards and the exercise didn’t end there and I decided to test the seemingly delicate structure for it’s load carrying capacity. The three storied house of cards was made using 80 cards each of which has a surface area of 28mm x 70mm. The total surface area of cards comes to 0.157 sq. m. Assuming that the cards are made of 350 GSM paper, the weight of the structure comes to about 55 grams.

For loading, I used some handy desk things: a 15M fibreglass measuring tape weighing 280 grams, A glass bottle with a porcelain lid filled with pistachio shells weighing 690 grams. The structure held the weight of the two well. The moment I removed the bottle and tried to load it with a small darabuka weighing more than the bottle, the structure collapsed.

So my conclusion was that rather crudely made circular house of old visiting cards carried about 17.6 times it’s own weight. Not bad, for a house of cards!