Last year, we wrote about an amazing pop-up penguin "bomb" made only of paper and rubber bands which had a surprising pop-up action. Made by papercraft artisan Haruki Nakamura, the toy is called Penguin Bomb Adelie Penguin.

On our visit to the amateur model and crafts event Wonder Festival last month, we were surprised to see Mr. Nakamura manning his own booth. As it turned out, he was selling the pop up penguin, together with other new products, so we bought one and brought it in to the office.

Assembly

The instructions are available in other languages if you download them from the official website but we used the Japanese version. The product consists of three sheets of craft paper, one instruction sheet and two rubber bands. Everything is clearly explained and the pieces snap out smoothly from the sheets.

Once all the pieces are removed, it's time to put them together

The key to the pop-up action lies in the two rubber bands, one in the head section and one in the body section, which act in tandem to create a strong enough pop-up force responsible for the dynamic action of the toy, as well as the stopper part, shown below (before assembly). It is cleverly designed to create a tab-lock thick enough to hold the compressed toy in place until it strikes a hard surface, thus releasing it and letting the rubber bands snap the penguin back to its original form.

Here is the upper half of the body section with the penguin's wings about to be attached.

The lower half with the penguin's feet...

It's all coming together.

You can see the first rubber band for the head section here.

Head section complete.

Using a special paper tool, the rubber band can be readied by pulling it taught and attaching it to a paper tab on the opposite panel inside.

The rubber band for the body section.

Pulling the rubber band in the bottom section.

Time to Play

Now we're ready to try our cool paper penguin toy. First, we flatten it.

Then we make sure the stopper is properly engaged on the bottom. And we're done!

Let's see if it works...

Et voila! It took us a total of 60 minutes from start to finish and we hardly made any mistakes along the way.

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If you'd like to find out more about Haruki Nakamura's amazing papercraft toys, please visit his website here or visit his YouTube channel here. The pop up penguin is also available for sale on Amazon.com if you don't live in Japan.