JustaDome

Introduction

Domes are very interesting and fun structures to work with and look at. They are unexpectedly strong and versatile. There is a lot of info about constructing domes from all manners of material, mostly concerning wood or metal pipes; and a lot of them require special or hard-to-get connection systems that make construction easy or just simply 'strong' for permanent use.

However, sometimes, you just want to own a dome that you can store in a sports-bag and put up and/or take apart in less than an hour and costs around 40 euro of parts. If you are this kind of person: this project is for you.

Basics

The idea behind this project is to use easily acquired trash-material as a basis for a dome.

It turns out that finding thrown-away wooden 'slatted bed bases' is quite easy. A lot of people throw them out into the trash the moment one of the slats break. A nice aspect about this base-material is that is often comes in semi-standard sizes. Finding enough material of 80CM slats turns out to be quite do-able.

Looking at dome construction techniques, it turns out that there is a fairly common and easily constructed arrangement available that will produce a dome with the specifications below:

3m60 diameter 2.2M height

Made out of 165 pieces of wood, joined at 61 places by steel bolts + wingnuts. The dome does not need to come apart entirely into seperate pieces of wood. Instead you can have it be kept and transported in around 30 bundles of wood that make assembly an easy thing to do.