Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

cheapy cabins in hippy-dippy days
 

http://www.avonelectric.co.nz/starplate/ cost more these days but were fast and easy back then.

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

design software,free trial. http://www.cadreanalytic.com/cadregeo.htm

i built a 20 foot diameter dome just like that from 3/4 inch conduit like 4 years ago. cost $200

now it would cost $400 with the price of steel doubling

if you wanted to make a really large dome i would use that tubing used for the top of chain link fencing they sell at home depot

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

Bump for the ideal

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

The best books for domes are Domebook 1 and Domebook 2 by Lloyd Kahn. Copies are frightfully expensive, $100 and up. They are that good. But before building any dome you should read Shelter by the same author. Domebook 3 is a chapter in Shelter. It is a look back at the domes covered in Domebooks 1 & 2 from ten years later. The review is slightly depressing.

Domes have a lot of problems that are not apparent at first. One is the ratio of volume to floor space. Another is the ratio of floor space to useable floor space. You can improve that ratio by building ordinary walls to lift the dome, but then your dome is nothing more than a funky roof. And then you discover that domes are always difficult to seal against rain.

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

A relative has a friend who owned a 3-story one in the area around where I live. I got to see the inside of it at one point.

For a regular-use house, the interior is very space-age looking, but has LOTS of useless space. Many of the walls are at odd angles, and furniture is made with 90� angles in order to fit up against walls that are made with 90� angles.....

So the best building design (for a regular-use house) is to make all the outer dome surface as windows, and have supportive walls inside, and that way you can place those interior walls at 90� angles, so that furniture will fit....

,,,-but a big selling point of domes is that the outer dome is supposed to be the load-bearing surface, leaving the interior free of load-bearing walls. So you run into a problem when you want all the exterior panels of most kit systems as windows.


Nice idea, but needs some work yet.

-end-

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

That was one of the points brought out in Domebook 3: people are at right angles. Refrigerators are at right angles. Book shelves are at right angles. Domes are not.

People in the dome building fad of the 70s were eventually captivated by their discovery of ferrocement. But with ferrocement you are not constrained to build a dome; you can build any shape. And that was pretty much the end of the dome building fad. The drawback of ferrocement is that you need about fifty friends to apply the cement. Fifty pairs of rubber gloves, fifty pairs of rubber boots, fifty cases of beer ...

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

so what do you do with it now??

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

All that work and you have a big open air geodesic shaped tinker toy. Most people would die of exposure. The Indians had the tee-pee idea right.

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

I'd like to see the 'flattened ends' of that conduit stand up against the snowpack I deal with every winter. Structurally flattened ends are crushed in a manner that keeps the center centered, with a taper to spread the load evenly.

Re: Building a Cheap Geodesic Dome for under $50
 

anyone ever played with lengths of rebar ?

a 20(?) ft length with the each end stuck in the ground 1 foot
add a second length crosswise, etc . . .

something similar to this

http://www.adomedream.com/sitebuilde...ebar_frame.JPG