Assembly of Structure

Flattening the ends of the struts:

To accommodate the holes for the bolts at the nodes, we had to flatten the ends of the struts. We began to do this with a vice but after about 2 hours abandoned this idea as it was immensely hard to close the vice on the strut ends. This was something we thought we would accomplish more easily with the use of aluminium rather than steel......oh how wrong we were!

Click the picture to enlarge 

We then decided to use a hammer to flatten the ends, this required about 10 or so hits at each end of a strut, produced inconsistent results and tired the arms quite quickly. We had to devise yet another way to flatten the ends. Finally we realised there was a sledge hammer leaning against the wall at the other end of the shed in plain view, almost mocking us.

The sledge hammer worked perfectly! It took only one or two hits and produced the same nice flat result every time.

Drilling the ends of the struts:

We marked about a cm in from the ends of each flattened strut end and drilled a 7mm hole to accommodate our 6mm bolts. We had to rest the strut ends on a flat piece of wood to ensure consistent and neat holes.

Bending the ends of the struts:

The ends of the struts had be to bent in particular directions and at particular angles (depending on their place in the dome) so that they would all fit together nicely when added to a node. We did this simply by hitting it with the hammer. It could have been done, probably with more finesse, in the vice.

Putting the struts together:

A step by step guide to the assembly of the structure

Step-by-Step Frame Construction Photos

Archive Photos - Constructing the frame

Problems

Bending and flattening the ends

We realised, while putting the struts together, that they would not all fit (especially at nodes with 6 vertices coming together) unless a longer section of the struts was flattened at each end so as not to interfere with one another at the nodes. This required some disassembly and re-flattening.

The dome instructions made no sense

The instructions and research we had gathered on the actual assembly of the dome and integration of each strut were relatively clear before we commenced assembly. This was not the case however, when we began assembly. Absolutely no sense could be made from the backwards and poorly explained assembly process diagrams and descriptions so we went about making our own (above, under Putting the struts together).