Anyone ever built a geodesic dome ? (quite big!) Any advice to offer ?
Requirement is for once-a-year assembly, short use, and then on-site storage for the remainder. So it needs to dismantle and re-assemble, but doesn't need to be especially portable or robust. Budget is of course negligible.
I never thought I'd get to use the phrase "I think you should build a yurt instead, it's so much more practical", but this seems to be fitting the bill !
No
Scafolding poles?
Regards
Philip
Plenty of info on the net. You need to find a supplier of free wood. Short bits only are needed for the frame of each piece, so hopefully there must be someone to whom the short bits are useless. The covering for each section again can be offcuts, but I would expect availability to be less.
mrcheerful
Out of interest, why a geodesic dome, rather than, say, a big tent or an inflatable building?
Colin Bignell
A friend has made two over the years:
Just make up loads of indentical al plates and sqaure section rods, and bolt it all together.
Not very helpful but . .
A Tipi is much easier to put up than a yurt and creates a more beautiful space. Mine is 20ft diameter and about 20ft high at the apex
N
Because geodesic domes are perfect and can be built for no money (tm)
The reality, the more I look into it, is of course somewhat different.
As far as I can see, no-one has built a wooden framed demountable dome without using non-wooden joints. I can provide the timber cheaply, but making it portable as well is going to cost either time or money.
For a panelled dome, most of those actually constructed (especially '70s housing in the USA) weren't geodesics (pin-jointed sticks) but had turned into stressed-skin structures without anyone realising. These were also stressed-skins with built in failure lines, and sure enough a lot of them failed!
There's also a range of geometries to choose from - pure Bucky Fuller shapes are far from the best. Humans can't make such efficient use of hemispheres or pure dome sections, so distortions like Zomes are certainly worth looking at for a permanent structure.
As to the tent alternatives, then I'm inclined that way myself. I'm thinking of a large "bender", based on tensioned bow frames, maybe in carbon fibre tube. These also work as open-fronted "stages" more easily than a geodesic.
Colin Bignell wrote | Andy Dingley wrote | > Requirement is for once-a-year assembly, short use, and then | > on-site storage for the remainder. So it needs to dismantle | > and re-assemble, but doesn't need to be especially portable | > or robust. Budget is of course negligible. | Out of interest, why a geodesic dome, rather than, say, a big tent or an | inflatable building?
Tentwise, if the requirement is during the winter season then a circus big top might cost comparatively little to hire. Or the Welsh National Eisteddfod have a purpose-built tent they only use I think once a year.
My other idea is polytunnels.
Owain
Some friends and I built one to camp in at an early Womad festival. It was about 5m across and made from bamboo poles and ripstop nylon (We were living in Bristol and airballoon offcuts come for free). Great fun, took a couple of hours to put up
Anna
~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repairs / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
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