mykle systems labs

Sorry to keep you in suspense!  The cold I’m fighting has me too tired in the evenings to blog about the day’s events.  But to summarize …

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I know what you’ve been thinking:

“That guy’s dome is too big.”

I’ve been in denial.  I’m sorry.

I plotted out the 32 foot floor plan, and eyeballed the rest.  But that third dimension is a bitch.  I’m bumping and scraping against the limbs of our three mighty trees, but that’s not even the problem — limbs are flexible.  The problem is, I’m now touching the overhead wire that delivers the Internet to my next-door neighbors. I hardly need tell you, The Internet, what it would mean for my neighbors’ quality of life if I accidentally severed that wire.

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90% done now, and the thing is hee-yuge!  I wish it had an upstairs.

More than half of my time in the last three days was spent driving around town, picking up bamboo from the yards of my friends.  There are now six varieties of bamboo in play, with different diameters and colors and traits.  It could get messy, but it seems to be holding up well.

Yesterday I started Stage Seven before running out of duct tape again.  I’m off to the store for more, but I think I may actually have enough bamboo now, which means the frame will be done soon — soon like tomorrow!

Then I have to work out how to get the tarps onto it.  I can’t really climb it, and my ladder won’t reach the top, but I’ve got some ropes and some ideas.

That’s a lie — my worker-elves and I spent some extra days collecting, cleaning and marking bamboo.  Lightbar eats more bamboo than a giant panda!  I need 170 sticks to complete the 5/8 dome and I’m still about 80 short.  But with what I have, I’m about done with Stage Five of the plan.

(Incidentally, that link is only one of several places online where you can find Bucky Fuller’s original plan transcribed.  Somewhere my mother has copies of the original Domebook that first published it.)

I also built the stilts described in the instructions, using an excellent bamboo knot that Lam taught me:

Thanks to Andy & Bax for the fluorescent orange 550 cord, and for stocking duct tape in obscure colors like white.

Now the dome has begun to assume a spherical shape on top, while still flopping out on the sides.  It resembles a limp octopus, or one of my wife’s sculptures.  But I can finally visualize just how big it’ll be.

To prevent the tarp from sagging and collecting rain, I added five more struts at the top.  Each one bisects a hexagon vertically, and then all five intersect in the top pentagon.  It’s really lovely how lashing more bamboo to this just makes it more spherical.

The duct tape is holding just fine so far, although we’ve still had no rain.  Really it’s excellent weather we’re having for the middle of January, but it’s cold and windy as hell.  When I put Stage Three up on the stilts it kept blowing over.   But now it’s free standing, and beginning to feel rigid.  I’m looking forward to that magical moment when I make the final joint and the whole thing becomes stiff and strong.

I don’t think I’ll be able to climb this dome without a bit of reinforcement.  And I won’t need to, but I can imagine a dome just like this, but built with thicker bamboo, that would make a wonderful jungle-gym.

I finished the first two stages this afternoon before I ran out of light, leaving a great big bamboo pentagram in the middle of my yard.  (I’m told this will repel Christians.)

Fuller’s plan would have me cut all the poles to a rough length after marking, but i’d really rather keep them whole, and somehow work the extra structure into the dome.  So far I seem to be getting away with it.  There’s always little extra bits of bamboo flopping around, but I can cope.

I’m using about 1 foot x 1 inch of duct tape for each cross intersection, and 1′ x 2″ two times on each joint between two crosses.  so that’s going to be something like 2 & 1/2 feet of 2-inch duct tape, times 85 crosses = about 70 yards.  That’s about one big roll, and a bit more.

I’ve left the whole thing uncovered outside.  Dew will form on it, and rain may fall.  Let’s see if I can really get away with using duct tape on this.  If not, I may upgrade to white gaff tape.

The bamboo I’m working with is an interesting local variety; some call it “Oregon Bamboo” but I have no idea what the latin name is.  I harvested a bunch of this years ago, using a Forest Service permit to remove non-native species from parks.  Unlike store-bought, kiln-dried bamboo, this stuff doesn’t split and remains fairly flexible.  I love working with it.  It has an interesting anatomical feature: each node is armored with a single flat-growing leaf that wraps almost the entire surface.  So I have to “shell” each node by twisting the leaf until it breaks off.  Somehow it reminds me of unwrapping fine cigars.  Also, the leaves of this bamboo are slightly itchy — unless you’re allergic, like my friend Chet, in which case they’re extremely itchy and will cause you to break out in hives.  So no leaves, please.

Because I left my pile of bamboo sitting outside for years in slightly damp conditions, a black must began growing on the uncovered ends, feeding on the natural waxy coating of the bamboo.  So before I can use the stuff, I have to wash it off with some Murphy’s Oil Soap and some bleach.

Cleans up nice, don’t it?

Unfortunately, it looks like I don’t have nearly enough of the stuff to finish my dome.  I have some other bamboo, but it’s all either too stiff or too brittle.  Thursday I’m headed to my local State Park with a bamboo-cutting permit, hoping to bag 100 more sticks without significantly ruining the landscape.

1/12/09

This year, our seasonal affective disorder treatment center is relocating from a 40′ tetrahedron to a 32′ hemisphere — leapfrogging all the other platonic solids!  Corners are out, curves are in!

And so I get to build a geodesic dome — a rite of passage for architecture nerds.  I’ll be using Bucky Fuller’s famous bamboo plan, creating a 5/8 dome out of 170 sticks of bamboo and some duct tape.  This design works with the flexibility of bamboo to avoid the need for fancy joints.

I tried to build the same dome several years ago, but failed in unexpected ways: my knots were too tight, and I attempted a fairly small dome from fairly thick bamboo.  The internal tension tore the thing apart, and then the knots caused the bamboo to kink.  But this time, longer poles will flex better and duct tape will be more forgiving (and cheaper) than 550 cord.  Or not … let’s find out!

I have no idea if this dome will be strong enough for me to climb, but it ought to support my 40′ x 40′ white polytarp, which formed the skin of previous Lightbars.  Because I wore a hole in the center of it, it’s no longer suitable for tetrahedral use.   It’ll cover a dome, tho … albiet in a baggy, saggy sort of way.  I’ll probably need four smaller side-tarps as well.

I like duct tape for the joints because I’m an aspiring redneck, but also because lashing bamboo can be hard.  Bamboo has a natural waxy coating that resists the friction we need to prevent it moving around in a joint.  My initial tests suggest that duct tape will work great, but I do worry about it softening and unpeeling.  Fortunately, Lightbar takes place in the cold month of February.  If the duct tape shows signs of loosening, I may back it up with zip-ties.