'Custom' dome

supersurly · Post by **supersurly** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 10:23 pm

This is what happens when you add scrap emt and the elliptical rho formula. This dome is so fucking custom I'm not even sure you could take it apart and put it back together without having to make more pieces. I've built a couple domes where I honestly tried to make them perfect, with 1/8th accuracy, accounting for all the stuff, this dome is not like that. I'd say my accuracy factor is +/- 2 inches, with limited measuring, no real jigs, and I even borrowed some scrap pieces that were leftovers from other domes, as long as they were within a couple inches. I even put a 3' section in where the plans called for a 5'10"....

I'd show you pictures of how fucked up each individual vertex is, but it's too embarassing and my phone died. Imagine having to actually twist around 20% of the struts around 15 degrees to get them to line up and then having them bend backwards...

Original uh, 'guidelines', with 75 pieces and around 18 different strut lengths:

end product:

You'd think custom like this would be easy and cheap, but no, it requires thousands of dollars worth of tools and years of experience.

'good enough is perfect'

falk · Post by **falk** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 12:01 am

Ooooh, a Roper Whitney sheet metal punch. It is to drool.

I've often wondered if you couldn't design a viable dome by simply getting a marker and putting random dots on a beach ball and connecting the dots.

supersurly · Post by **supersurly** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 10:28 am

Depends on what you mean by viable. As long as you maintained some degree of non-randomness you would end up with something that worked, but it wouldn't be pretty or easy to build. If it was truely random(probably impossible anyway, since humans don't think things like a random number generator spitting out 100 zeros in a row is really random) then you would get things where a strut was too long or to short to really work or to support the dome stresses. A major problem with this one was managing the growing inventory size and the fact that I drew the model using decimals and calculated the strut sizes with fractions, then didn't bother converting to a compatible system before construction.

I'd be pretty pumped up if we actually switched to metric sometime this century. I was in home depot looking around the other day(i accidently walked out with the bucket you see in the pictures without paying for it, whoops) and some guy was looking for metric bolts, which they don't have. I made a joke about the metric system being for canadians and europeans and the 'associate' who was helping me said something about how strange the canadians are, like they're space aliens from the dark moon of some distant planet where having reasonable health care and comporting themselves with some degree of dignity on the world stage are worthy things for a country to pursue, and maybe, just maybe, gasp, homosexuals are possibly human beings too! Those crazy canadians!

So the punch makes you drool but the saw and the press don't? What about the bottle of chambord?

falk · Post by **falk** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 11:55 pm

Ahhh, but I already have a saw and a press (not as nice as yours though, but they did the job.) Didn't notice the bottle.

robotland · Post by **robotland** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:19 am

I hope you're planning on bringing that funky thing to BRC- I'll put you on the Parade Of Domes 2005 list if you do. So what goes on top? I suggest a bright yellow canvas cover, since that would make it look even MORE like a Marshmallow Peep.

supersurly · Post by **supersurly** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 1:50 pm

I'll bring it if someone else wants it, it's free to a good home, or even a bad one. Honestly it's not as bad as I say...

It was just sort of a test run of my 3d geodesic modelling program to make sure the values it generates actually translate into something you can build in the real world. Unfortunatly I think that elliptical domes are quite a lot of work, too much to be really sensible, although I still might build a nice big one somewhere, this is the design I really like:

falk · Post by **falk** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 2:06 pm

Awesome. I hope you release that software to the wild. What OS does it run under?

Here's what I'd really like to see: A geodesic dome in the shape of Buckminster Fuller's head:

http://shop.usps.com/cgi-bin/vsbv/posta ... ID=4849106

supersurly · Post by **supersurly** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 9:29 pm

falk wrote:Awesome. I hope you release that software to the wild. What OS does it run under?

Here's what I'd really like to see: A geodesic dome in the shape of Buckminster Fuller's head:

http://shop.usps.com/cgi-bin/vsbv/posta ... ID=4849106

Those guys who did the mister/big fan thing in center camp two years ago and last year they were on the 3 oclock thingie, they have an omnitriangulated buckminster fuller nose.... geodesic doesn't really fit since geodesic means an arc.

My software is a self-taught cocoa programming class, so it's under mac os x, open gl of course. It could be ported to windows or linux fairly easily, but I won't do it. I actually wrote it fairly well in the beginning, then I seriously broke the mvc paradigm to get some features in so I could finish some projects. Now it sucks and the interface is trash. Anyone that is interested in working on it please let me know and I'll set something up.

'Custom' dome

'Custom' dome

Peep Show