Hi all,
My single man house project has been coming well. I'm at the 50% mark. Things that only delays this project are personal laziness and isolation from time to time.
The top one is a scaled down dome I built few weeks ago. I'm confident that after building one or two domes, I'll be able to build a real dome out of custom wood strut I make. I plan to build three domes: one for a single bed room, another for workshop and living quarter, the last for small power station cover.
Most Permaculture farmers build Earthbag houses if they can. It has practical advantages indeed. Frankly speaking pure Earthbag house is simply labor intensive and somewhat obsolete technology. I decided to get rid of using heavy machines for the house project when I started. Then, I realized digging ground to supply all soil for Earthbag house with shovel and bucket is too much for me. 40kg to 50 kg per Earthbag. If I had big property, I could have tried it.
So I started looking for another building technology that I can use. There was Geodesic Dome by Buckminster Fuller. When I found it, I had flash of intellectual enlightenment. LOL. Constructing a perfect sphere that spreads impact to whole surface is simply brilliant. Also it does not have a single supporting column.
There are web sites and commercial dome software that helps to design dome. Entering dome radius and shape in the program automatically generate all data: element strut sizes for creating triangles, hub or joint size, exploded assembly diagram on 2D. I'll personally recommend it who has interest in Geodesic dome.
I chose the hard way though: pencil and paper, couple books, a pocket calculator. Even though I'm using Geodesic dome software, I like to understand the dome technology thoroughly.
What I've learned is symmetric model has one serious flaw, which is if one component is in wrong place the entire structure become unstable. When you build a Geodesic dome model, swapping two different strut means you need to find the mistake or rebuild it again. The advantage is same pattern repeats itself to create whole structure. Once you master pattern manipulation by few trial and error, dome building becomes very simple and in consistence. Then size becomes irrelevant. Mastering a dome with radius 50cm make you build any size of domes practically. This is beauty of symmetric model. Only variation is the strength of strut and joint material.
I'll keep uploading pictures of dome models and real domes later on.
3rd model. a geodesic dome model. I didn't calculate the joint size.
2nd model, tensegrity structure
1st model, tensegrity structure