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 of around