Quick PVC Flooring Tangram

This project was something I've had in the back of my mind for a little while but the Instructables PVC Speed challenge gave me a bit of motivation to do something about it!

PVC flooring is commonplace in hospitals, education and a bunch of other applications all around the world. There is an abundance of waste material from installations and many flooring contractors would be happy to let you take some of their trash, particularly in the small quantities that this project needs. 

PVC Flooring comes in a range of different colours which make it great to use in art projects.

Tangrams are fun little toys and this project was super quick to make. The same steps in this instructable could easily be used in other projects that require shapes to be cut out in different colours… 

Materials:

• Sheet vinyl flooring - Offcuts may be available from a local flooring provider.
• Backing materials - Up to you what to use here but stick to something your drop saw can cut. Preferably solid wood, MDF or ply
• Glue - Epoxy or other high strength glue. I've tried PVA for similar jobs and it just doesn't have the hold needed to keep the sheet vinyl flat.

Tools:

• Sliding mitre saw
• Stanley knife: to cut sheet vinyl

Having a template handy for your Tangram project makes everything a whole lot easier to get your head around during the steps that follow. In this image you can see a timber tangram that I had already cut out. You don’t need a timber template, cardboard cut to shape or even paper would work for this. 

You might already have a tangram toy on hand to use as a template like I did.

There is an abundance of Tangram templates available online such as this example - https://www.thoughtco.com/tangrams-geometry-worksheet-2312325 

Print, draw or cut your template to the desired size. For my tangram the overall square is approximately 140mm x140mm

If you want to create something unique or more complex beyond a tangram by all means draw up your own template and use the principles in the steps below to cut copies of your template.

PVC flooring is relatively flexible. It can be curved around surfaces so for this project it needs a bit of a backing to give it some structure. I have used 3mm MDF for this instructable but any timber or similar stiff sheet material could be used. 

• Cut your flooring into shapes roughly twice the size of your tangram template. This will give you enough parts to make two tangrams, or to have duplicate parts incase anything gets damaged during the process! Try to use a section of the flooring that is as flat as possible. 
• Cut your backing material (in this case MDF) to roughly the same size as the flooring pieces
• Apply glue to the back of your flooring piece and fix this to your backing material. If you don't have some kind of applicator to spread the glue out you can always cut yourself an extra little piece of vinyl flooring to do this with. Hold the material down with weights. If you have spare backing material you can use this to sandwich the glued up parts underneath some weights. - I have used epoxy glue for a super strong bond in this project. Flooring adhesives will work as well. 
• Allow the glue time to dry based on the glue’s specific instructions

Now that your material is nice and rigid with it’s backing you can start to cut up the shapes. First you need to create a right angle. Likely the glue applied in the previous step didn't go all the way to the edges all over the material. This is fine, and in this step you are able to cut off those edges of material that didn't get coated in glue. 

Please use your PPE for this project. 

• Using your drop saw, clamp your material in place and cut one edge. 
• With the drop saw locked at a 90 degree cut push the freshly cut side against your rail and cut another edge to create your 90 degree angle. 

Now that you have a right angle you can start to create your shapes for the Tangram. Your templates will really help make this cutting stage a lot easier. You can use your templates as guides 

• Take your square tile from your template and use this as a guide to cut out a strip of material the width of this square. Cut this strip into squares. You can double up your two different colours here to make sure all the pieces come out the same size
• The Parallelogram is the best shape to cut next. Cut a strip the height of the parallelogram first while your saw is still set to 90 degrees and then move to a 45 to make the next cuts. See the images here for how i have clamped a guide piece in place using my template to get the size right. 
• Starting from the largest triangles down to the smallest, use your templates as guides to cut pieces off of your material to create the pieces of your Tangram. The images here show how I laid out each template to align the blade to cut correctly. Using your templates in this step really takes a lot of the guess work out of how to cut these shapes.

Depending on what the backing material used in this project was you might need to do some cleanup. The MDF I used cut very clean so I didn’t actually need to do anything here. As you can see in this image I had enough parts cut out to make two whole tangrams (either mixed colours or the same) with some pieces leftover.