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.

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.

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 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.

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.