Archive for November, 2009

The Dome Story: Part Two

Author: admin

Nov 5

by Puzzle

The first time the dome went up, there was beer.

The first time the dome went up, there was beer.

We got the dome done the night before we left to go to the Alchemy Work Weekend. You see, mcGruff and I are both the kind of people who like the thrill of getting it all done at the very last moment. We got it up and screwed the last of the bolts down and here it was, this figment of my imagination and subject of my occasional ire, a structure that before was a pile of conduit and we bent it to our will. It was the first time that I really have ever built something of this scale from scratch. We popped a couple of celebratory beers and sat in the middle of the dome, in the middle of mcGruff’s front yard and patted ourselves on the back for awhile.
I have been festival camping every spring and summer for 6 seasons. I loved pagan festivals, I love hippie festivals, I love burns. By this point in my career as a festival hippie I should have this all down pat, but it never fails that I end up at the site just in enough time to hurridedly get my camp set up before the sun goes down. The Alchemy Work Weekend was no exception, just one large addition- a geodesic dome I had never put up before and a covering for said dome that was entirely untested. We arrived at Cherokee Farms at shortly before dusk having stopped at  Harbor Frieght to buy a 20 x 30 ft heavy duty tarp to serve as the water proof covering. Last year the water proof was not as much of a concern, but in this year Georgia was quickly catching up on all the missed rain fall from the prior three years.

Putting the dome up for its first use as shelter.

Putting the dome up for its first use as shelter.


With help we managed to get the dome up and tightened down in about an hour. We had the covering wrapped around it and tucked under just as it got dark. We had to use two tarps, the larger around the back and the sides, which left a curved hole in the front of the dome. We used a smaller tarp to put in that hole and made a door where the two tarps came together. Used bungees to hold the whole mess down and try to pull it tight enough to keep water puddles from forming on the top. It looked a real mess but it was up and it was covered and we were so busy trying to get the everything loaded in before dark that I didn’t really take it in until much later that evening.
15′ is far larger than I had any real mental concept of. We have a queen size air mattress and blown up it didn’t really make a dent in the total floor space. When we went to bed that night the rain was only a drizzle. A couple of hours later I woke to a steady rain fall and happily wasn’t soaked. When we woke up the next morning the land was soaked, the outside of the dome was soaked and we had a little water on the ground tarp, but nothing was wet on the inside, most especially not us.
When the Work Weekend was over we tore down the dome, just the two of us this time, and things went pretty smoothly. The liberal application of a deeper socket and a power drill made it all much easier. We packed it all up and headed home for the final push to get the cover done. The last thing we had left to do was to take the huge tarp and cut it into shingles. Why shingles? .
One of the environemental stressors on the playa is the wind. Huge dust storms and high winds can be murder on any structure’s cover. It can also be murder on your sanity because anything not tightened down flaps in the wind. There is also the heat to consider. Much of the afternoons are not windy, but hot and stagnant. We didnt expect to be able to sleep in it during the day, but we wanted the ability to give a little air flow through the dome in the heat of the afternoon.
There are lots of ways to cover a dome, just type “geodesic dome covers” into your favorite search engine. And each of those sites has their own plans and suggestions on how to do it. We talked about several and their pro’s and con’s, we read all kinds of websites and we talked to other dome geeks in our community. The Weasel.com explaination was the best site we found for a place to start and a discussion of all kinds of coverings. It is also where we got the idea for how to wrap the dome in the big tarp for the purposes of the Work Weekend.
Massive Tarp and Bungees: Worked at the Work Weekend, kept us dry and didn’t let all the nature in. When we got in it to go to bed it was obvious that the air flow was almost nil. In Georgia that means a little uncomfortable, on the playa no air flow makes it three times as hot and unbearable. As you can see by the photo, it was also not the tightest of coverings. In 2007, the flapping of the tent I slept in made me a little nutty, a tarp with all kinds of places for the wind to catch and flap would have tried my sanity.

Ta Da! It's a dome and we're gonna live it!!

Ta Da! It's a dome and we're gonna live it!!

Parachute: We thought about a parachute, round, one piece and not too thick. It also tears easily, doesn’t tie down well and lets in all kinds of dust. While I was ready to accept that with a dome we were likely to end up with a lot more tiny piles of playa on and in everything, I wanted a little protection from the piles. Parachute material is expensive and we couldnt have used it at Alchemy and other non-desert events because they are not water proof at all.
Recycled Vinyl: Typical source for this is a company like Lamar or another billboard advertising company. I called several places and got the same answer- that they recycle most of the vinyl now. This means you have to know someone in order to get one and sadly I don’t know anyone in the billboard replacement industry.
Tyvek: I didn’t know that this stuff existed in huge sheets, I was only familiar with the security envelopes used in offices. It’s a fabric material made of  high density polyethylene fiber. You see this wrapping on big domes on the playa but I had no idea what it was. You can get it at the larger construction supply stores or online, but its not cheap and requires custom fitting each shingle and then connecting them together. We didn’t have the time and by this point in the usage of the dome we were beginning to realize that our measurements weren’t exact and so it was always a little different of a shape each time we put it together. Not the ideal situation for an expensive custom fit dome cover.
Shingles w/ Rope: The winner was the covering we found here.  It met all our requirements, it allowed air flow, would allow to be water proof, was easy to pack and made use of the huge freaking tarp we already had. The plans called to cut a hole in the top tarp at the top of the dome and put a cover over it to keep some of the playa out.  It required figuring out how to grommet, which we did and it was a noisy process. mcGruff did the math on the length of the angles. We would have been better to have made a full set of plans, but hindsight is always 20/20.

Freaking huge tarp!

Freaking huge tarp!

We stretched the tarp out in the front yard and tried to play puzzle while we cut out the peices. The math was a little off and we didnt know at the time how off the measurements of the conduit was. We cut out larger rectangular pieces and then put them up on the dome and then used a box cutter to cut out the shapes based on the dome itself. Then we marked holes where the grommets needed to go. It was a fun and sometimes frustrating job but we got all the pieces cut out and mcGruff did the heavy banging to get the grommets placed.
The concern with this type of cover was the connection points and the bolts used to put it all together. The concern was based in the tarp rubbing those places as it fought the wind on the playa. We used thin, cheap plastic cutting boards cut into squares, holes punched in the corner and attached with zip ties over each of the conjunctions. Easy and cheap and except for the zip ties, reusable.
By the time we got it all done we were in the last throws of packing and getting ready to leave for our adventure. What this practically resulted in was we didn’t put the whole cover on all at once. We put each piece, each piece fit and thus it made sense that they would all fit when put together. We did not label the pieces either because you think at the time you will remember what those pieces look like and that will be enough. It’s a lie. Label all your pieces.
The story of our trip and our arrival on the playa will be in a seperate bit of story telling, but the first thing we did when we got our placement at PolyParadise was pull everything out of the car and put up the dome. We got our placement at about 10:30am, which means that we had about an hour or two before it got hot.

First layer on the playa...

First layer on the playa...

We had been on the road for three days, we had slept in the holding pen outside of the gates for more than 12 hours, we had been anticipating the arrival of the Camp Daddy for hours and here we are finally on the playa putting up this dome we had spent so much time on. mcGruff and I work very well together and so we just did it.
The angles were not exact and we had to do more bending on the poles to get them up, but we did it pretty quickly and the two of us put the whole thing up in about an hour. The cover peices came out next and it was then that we realized why you label your pieces. After a couple of weeks of not touching them and after the brain numbing that had been the sleep deprevation all of the pices looked pretty similar. It took far longer than we had originally anticipated to put the cover on and in the process it got hot.
The structure was up, the shingles were getting attached in sort of the same way they had been during the cutting and fitting and process and we were nearing completion when we realized that the shingles didnt complete the cover. We had a space of a couple of inches there the shingles didnt overlap. Looking back and thinking on it, we didnt put much importance on the preciseness of the measurement of the poles or how we pounded them down and that played out in the shingles. In order for the shingles to work the dome had to be the same each time we put it up. It wasnt far off but off enough that we were left with small gaps. The plus side- this is the desert, so we didnt have to worry out rain. It meant in the end that we had more playa in the dome than we would have otherwise, but it did mean that we had more air flow.


So much costuming

So much costuming

The first day on the playa you don’t realize how much the environment would like to impose its standards on you. By the time we got done we were both tired, a little annoyed and we had a dome. Our home on the playa was constructed and if I felt pride at the Work Weekend, this was downright Seven Deadly Sin Pride.
We used a fabric drop cloth as the flooring which worked better than I expected. Kept the playa from caking on us and the stuff on the ground and kept some of the dust down. It meant that I woke up with a mouth full of playa less often. We hung a PVC pole run with string to two of the upper poles to make a clothes line, had a 4ft long rectangular table, a set of shelving, four large Action Packers, a queen sized double fill air mattress, a full size cooler, an extra large camp chair and a couple cases of canned beverages all in the dome with ample room to get around and the ability to stand up in the middle and most of the way around. I realized then that I was unlikely to ever go back to a traditional fabric tent. Big round spaces for me all the way.
Creative ways were created to pull the tarps up on the side to allow air flow. We were graced with favorable weather and while there were a lot of mid-afternoon dust storms because of the thickness of the tarps we got less dust from those storms but were able to take advantage of the moving air. It allowed for a lot of afternoon naps and hanging out in the tent while the dust storms got us.
Overall, I love this dome. I am proud of the work that we did. It was a big project and while we made what I would chock up to rookie mistakes we completed it from start to finish. We stopped every dome maker and dome owner we ran across on playa and it was funny to get some of them talking because I know that excitement.
By the time we had spent a week living in the dome we were talking about the next dome we were going to build. Now of course we understand more how important things like careful measurement are and understand that the correct tools make for much more precise work. Since then we have also discovered Harbor Freight who seems to carry everything we couldn’t find in the beginning.
In my head I imagine Disco Nap Camp at Burning Man 2011 (my next trip out) in a dome at least 30′ constructed out of heavy enough conduit that would allow us to string up several hammocks and other devices of sleeping and resting. Attach to that a larger version of a cooling system we ran across on our adventure this year and you have a nice place for people to hangout in the heat of the day and nap. I would also like to build a Hexayurt for a smaller camping structure and ’cause they are shiny and cute.
The moral of my long rambling story is that I almost didn’t do this project because I didn’t think I had the know-how or ability. When it comes down to it I wouldn’t have attempted it if not for mcGruff’s knowledge, but now I am willing to dig into build projects I would have considered out of my league before completing this project and I have this nifty cool dome to live in when I camp.

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  • Filed under: burning man, dome building

    • The Dome Story, Part One

    Author: admin

    Nov 1

    by Puzzle
    Dome up, cover almost on, Burning Man 2009
    Dome up, cover almost on, Burning Man 2009

    There are plans for the two of us to sit down and write a more technical account of how we built it, this is more of a telling of the story and less of a manual on what *not* to do. :)

    It was our little gray home on the playa and it started as a conversation about tents. Almost a year later, and after much in the way of trial and error and occasionally just error, we put up our first home-made geodesic dome and lived in it. While mcGruff has been foreman of the Alchemy Effigybuild team and has a full grasp of the laws of physics, I occasionally still feel the need to challenge the most basic laws of physics and have almost no construction experience at all. Since my trip out to Burning Man in 2007 I had lazily looked at geodesic domes and the plans for making them but not really ever thought that crafting and building one would be something I would take on. Enter my choice to travel and live with mcGruff for my 2009 playa trip and suddenly we have added knowledge and interest to my artistic plans.

    Original plans were to build a cardboard dome out of materials we collected and re-purposed (read Craigslist and dumpster diving) but after months of failing to find a source of cardboard that was consistent and large enough we had to find another solution to build or buy a tent. Buying a tent would have been too easy, so we started looking at building a dome out of PVC or conduit.

    PVC is lighter, less expensive and easier to work with. All perfectly reasonable reasons to go with PVC. It is also less hardy, prone to drying out and cracking in extremely dry environment. We decided on metal conduit and after more reading decided on 1/2″ rather than 3/4″ because of the difference in weight and the fact that we were going to make the cuts by hand. More reading and some time spent on Desert Dome’s Dome Calculator we decided on a 7 ‘6″ height, which meant a 15″ radius. Plans in hand, we went to Home Depot for the first of what was toward the end of construction, almost daily trips to the hardware store. We joke now that the first thing we have to do when visiting an area was find the Home Depot.

    It was a dark and stormy night… the night we decided to take over mcGruff’s living room and cut pipe.

    mcGruff working on cutting pipe
    mcGruff working on cutting pipe
    All the poles cut and lined up in bundles of 10
    All the poles cut and lined up in bundles of 10

    Each length meant two cuts, two cuts completed by hand with one of the little pipe cutters you would use to make minor repairs to your household plumbing. Several blades later, several cutters later and a great many safety breaks we had all the cuts done and the pipes moved out of the living room and into the garage.

    I wish I could say that from that point on it was a down hill slide into the building of a complete dome. It was not. The cuts were hard to make by hand but it was nothing compared to hammering the ends of the poles to flatten the area where the bolt holes were to be drilled.

    Our original plan was to use a metal plate attachment we found used on one of the dome construction sites so that we didnt have to pound down all the ends. Sadly, these plates that the sites claimed were easy to find at any hardware store were nowhere to be found anywhere in the Atlanta area. So, it was end pounding became our only option.

    The directions and advise from almost every site we read suggested that a hydraulic press should be used to flatten the ends. I could not agree more. We looked at Home Depot and they don’t sell them at the one near our house. We had not yet found the joy that is Harbor Freight and we couldn’t find anyone who owned one or would rent us one. We decided instead that a anvil and a sledge hammer would do the trick.  It was an absolute nightmare. We broke the anvil that our landlord had attached to work bench in the little shed. It was a job only mcGruff could do because I lacked the upper body strength and the height to use the anvil. The largest issue that doing all the hammering by hand was that the ends weren’t completely flat so when we went to drill the holes some of them had to be re-hammered. It also meant that when we went to put it together the angles of the poles were not exactly right.

    Puzzle giving that bit of metal hell.
    Puzzle giving that bit of metal hell.

    It took more than a month to get to a point where we had enough of the pipes pounded to start the process of drilling the ends. The great dome building gods of the intertubes decree “use a drill press”. Once again, I could not agree more. Several of the first holes were done by hand, but it was an undertaking that only mcGruff could handle.  Not understanding really what a drill press was or what one really did, we found a friend with a drill press that helped a great deal but was by no means significant enough to  provide the kind of assistance a sturdier drill press would bring to the process.

    The process went some thing like this.

    1. Dip the end of the drill bit in the bottle cap full of 10W30 motor oil. This was to try and keep the drill bit from over heating and bending. We went through three drill bits, none of them cheap.

    2. Check the drill to make sure that the power button is taped down well enough. The vibration was so high that the drill stop that would keep it on wasn’t sturdy enough so we solved the problem with liberal application of duct tape.

    3. Re-hammer the ends of the bar to make it flat enough.

    4. Line the pole up to very precise orange duct tape markers.

    5. Turn on the power strip that the drill is plugged into.

    6. Bring the drill down on the pole with one hand while you hold the pole with the other hand. Minor adjustments for the bumpy surface of the poles because of the hammering.

    7. Hope that you can get the drill through before it snags or over heats.

    Total time involved per hole, about 4 minutes. Add that to the fact that even with the motor oil I could only do about two poles per period without having to turn it all off and let the drill it cool down before starting again and it took far longer than I ever could have guessed.

    The angry tiki gods oversee the work.
    The angry tiki gods oversee the work.

    The other issue was the amount of metal shavings would end put coming off the drill bit. After the first 20 or so poles I got the hang and slight modifications that were needed to keep me from getting covered but by the end each work period I had a fine layer of metal shavings and motor oil all over my arms and face. It was fun work, loud and repetitive. It was a chance for me to work with my hands, get used to power tools and realizing that I can do stuff like this. It was a good lesson to have learned before the build insanity of Alchemy Public Works that followed in October.

    The last bit of planning was choosing hardware to hold it all together. Started with hex head that were about an inch too long with washers on each side. We ended up with round head bolts that were an inch and a half with two washers. Theses last two sentences do not at all encapsulate the amount of time and trials and wallet loosing and inability to count or forgetting the correct size and the chase of a wrench x2 in the same size.

    There was also the painting of the ends of the poles. Short poles red, long poles black. The advice we had been given was to spray paint the ends so that the metal was sealed where it had been cut through and pounded. Conduit rusts and the rusts can weaken the poles. I understand the concept but I don’t understand the execution. Okay, spray these holes with spray paint and they are coated. When you pick up the poles, the paint flakes off and when you push the bolts through the paint comes off. The useful side was that the painted poles were easy to separate out while we were putting the damn thing together.

    Level one up for the first time.
    Level one up for the first time.

    There was a special amount of excitement to lay out the bottom layer and start to screw it together. mcGruff actually put it together alone for the first time which was a great statement to how really easy these kinds of domes are. I am not sure that I could have put it together bottom up alone, but I am certain that I could do a top down build by myself. We did put it up from the bottom up each time we used it which was easier for us. There was a lot of bending that had to be done while we were putting it together because we were not terribly careful about the angle of the ends and how far it was flattened, etc. It’s certainly something you should pay attention. It’s one of the several reasons I believe we got a pretty limited number of uses out of the dome.

    We got it completely done for the first time the day before we packed up and went to the Alchemy Work Weekend. We knew it went up. We knew it was sturdy. We had no idea how we were going to cover it, but we were going to buy a big damn tarp and figure it out.

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  • Filed under: burning man, dome building