Building Our Laser Cut Geodesic Dome Kit

[Music] hello welcome to this fab lab maker hub video on building a geodesic dome well you should have got your geodesic dome kit by now and it should come either in a plastic bag like this with all the parts or on four separate sheets and you're going to have to punch out parts yourself either way what we need to do first of all is sort out all of the parts so i'm just going to do that and speed up the video to save a bit of time [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so now we have all our pieces organized let's work out what we actually have we open up the sheet in front of us what we have is ten of the six nodes hubs ten of these six node hubs we have six of the five node hubs and we have ten of the four node hubs as well ten of the four node hubs there we go um we should have 30 of the short struts little short struts and 35 of the long struts so these are called the a strut the short ones and these are called the b strut the long ones okay now we have our diagram of our dome here and we have a few instructions down the bottom the first instruction is assemble top pentagon highlighted in red first so when you construct a dome it's always easiest to actually build the dome from the top down rather than from the bottom up and there's a good reason for this when you're building a dome you need the dome to kind of like raise up in the air so lift up a layer at a time and you start at the bottom it's harder to keep the structure together because it's a wider base so you start off with the smaller section at the top and then build outwards and upwards and then it's a lot easier to build and that goes for any dome you small one here or even a large dome that you might build you know outside so okay let's get started and try and build our first pentagon so we need to start off with a five node hub to start with and the five node hub always have a short a strut so every time you see a five node hub you always need an a strut now the way these go together is they click together here and push in they just tight fit like that kind of a push in and they're together so i'm just going to grab these and just go round and do that on each of these so there we have our first part of the diamond so this is going to be the top of the dough the next thing we need to do is get some six node hubs and put them on the end of each one of these so a six node hub on the end of each one [Music] there we go so that's starting to look good so now connecting up between the six node hubs are the longer b struts so i'm going to grab a b strut here and this is where a bit of finessing might be needed to pull this out and just put them together like that grab a b strut push it in it might be a bit of a tight fit but if you just give them a little wiggle they tend to go in as you're doing it you'll notice that that the dome will want to start trying to creep outwards but you have to kind of pull them in together and it's this kind of tension that makes the dome nice and strong as we go there we go one thing i should have said is that when you do the pieces always make sure that you do them this way around with the notches facing downwards rather than with the notches facing upwards so if i show you here on this one so the notch is facing downwards rather than upwards so we want them not to stay down so the last one here might be the trickiest one to get in um push that in there and then we need to just try and pull that around and push that in so now we've made our first pentagon shape okay that's exactly like we have in the instructions we have the red pentagon there so now we have that we need to work outwards and downwards so it doesn't really matter kind of where you start but the thing you have to bear in mind is each one of these six notes hubs now has three empty spaces and the way that it works is well i used a wrong hub here i've just noticed aha don't you make the same mistake i use the five note hub instead of a six node hub so i need to put that one on there and put that there we go so as i was saying each one of these six node hubs has three empty spaces and when we're connecting up the next layers the middle space always has a short strut it always has an a strut and again make sure that the notches are pointing pointing downwards so i'm going to do the a struts first just so i know what i'm doing so a strut in the middle a strut in the middle a strut in the middle a strut in the middle and a strut in the middle there we go so now i can't get confused because i have all my a struts so all the other struts are going to be b struts for longer struts so we need the b struts so i'm going to connect the b strap there and b strut here and a b struck here and a b-stripe here b-stroke here b-strut here here [Music] there okay so i have all of my b struts in place now so we're starting to see the dome trying to take shape now what we need to do now is put on our um our nodes at the end here now bear in mind we always say that um five node hubs that's the five node hub just there five node hub they always connect up to it to an a strut so we're going to connect up the five node hubs to our short a struts that are pointing outwards so we should have one to the for five so that's the last of our five node hubs so there we go so we have another five node hub connected up to the the a strut at this point pointing out now we have our b struts coming down here and we're gonna have to try and put our six node hubs in these gaps here so if you see here the six note hub will go on two slots there on the on the hub so let me try and fit these in again you might need to just kind of like rise them apart a little bit let's just have a go here's that one there [Music] and that one is there just a little bit of pushing to get them in okay let's grab another one and do that here like this so as you can see i have the five node hub on the end of the a strut and then six node hub connecting the two b struts there and i'm just going to carry on around putting on my six note hubs just here so again we're just working our way sort of around and down in a kind of spiral fashion and i've used up the last of my hubs might be the tightest one to go in there we go okay so our dome is starting to look quite good here so you can see the uh the triangles deformed um we have we have our kind of pentagon shape i'll show you over on this here we have our kind of pentagon shape and then we have our our triangles coming here so these triangles here are all b sided triangles so these are an equilateral triangle whereas these triangles are different size shapes these are the isosceles triangles so we have two different sizes of triangles making up our dome connecting from our five to our six okay so now we just need to work our way out and down again so first thing we want to do is connect up around the bottom here of these ones so these are all connected with a struts from the five node hub to the six node hub so i'm just gonna go around the bottom with the with these struts and connect up around the bottom like that and you notice they kind of go in a in a kind of up down up down fashion [Music] again make sure that you get the struts the right way around with the notches pointing downwards that is important otherwise it won't actually fit together [Music] [Music] and you notice the dome is actually looking very strong now the structure is really starting to come together and become a really strong structure again when you start to get towards the end you might stop pulling these things out just rise them in a bit a little bit okay so we have all those ones in now we just have the last layer to do so what we need to do is go around and look at each of the hubs along the bottom and work out which is a five node and which is a sixth node now if you remember the rule every five node hub has a short a struct connected to it so we have to go around and try and find the five node hubs and connect up a struts to those so that's uh that one there is a five note hub one two three four five so this one has to have a struts connected to it so we'll put a struts on so if we go around and find all of the five node hubs usually it goes five node six nodes that's one two three one two three four five six so we skip that one let me move on to the next one one two three four five so the five node hubs have the a structs connected to them just like that keep going around that's a six node hub one two three four five six that's a five node connect up the five node hub with a structs there that's good anymore let's should be one more maybe one two three four five six one two three four five five no tough and one more once yeah so there we go okay so that's all of our five node hubs with the a struts connected to them what we need to do now is find the b struts and connect those up onto the six node hubs so let's put those ones down so okay so now we have the a's and the b's all connected up so the last thing to do is to take our four node hubs which are going to be the base and connect those to each one of the junctions at the bottom down here along along theirs so it might be easier to do this if you flip the dome upside down and we can start over here put that one in there that one there you may notice that that some of these could be a bit stiffer it could be the stiffest ones because now the structure of the dome is trying to pull the sides in so it's really starting to make the dome strong by putting these final pieces in down the bottom so these are the tightest ones to fit in but don't worry it will all come together in the end as you can see kind of clip in we can worry about pulling it all together once we have all the parts in there we go okay so last thing to do now is to connect up all the struts along the bottom so all those struts along the bottom are the b struts so these these ones here that we've got left and the way these connected on the bottom is a little bit different for the ones at the top they they don't connect on their edge they connect on their side so if i show you here they kind of connect they're going to connect like this along the bottom so i just put one of them in and you'll notice that again they have to kind of point inwards the slots there like that and this is where you might need to just pull them apart a little bit just to kind of get them get them connected as you go around you can kind of push them push them together and kind of push the parts join everything together if you've ever kind of like got lego bricks and tried to push them together to make them nice and secure same kind of ideas kind of push them together to try and make them secure [Music] make sure i get that the right way around almost got the wrong way around make sure that one is going nice and tightly in there like that again to pull them apart a little bit actually you see there that one kind of came apart a little bit if you see here this one kind of came apart a little bit um it's okay we can do with that we can push them back together again and make sure they're nice and tight in as you get towards the very last couple it is going to get quite tight and the last piece the very last piece put that one in there that one in there actually neat quite easily so there we have our completed geodesic dome now what you might need to do apart down the bottom there just kind of like make sure all the parts are nice and secure i can see a couple of pieces down here that aren't quite slotting together just need to kind of flip them together push down from each of the layers just settle it all together like that and if they start coming apart anywhere you just go around just kind of push them in on the nodes push down on the nodes and they should kind of push together so there we have our completed geodesign so you could decorate that paint it maybe cover it um you could cut out some triangles and stick them on and make your own dome customize it however you want it can look quite nice if you put a light underneath it i'll just show you here i have a little led light here [Music] put a little led light under there you can turn it into a nice lamp and if you cover that with the with paper and it could light up from the inside and it's a nice little idea okay so thanks for watching and i hope that you were able to put your dime together successfully if there's any uh questions you can leave them on our facebook page and we'll get back and answer them for you thanks [Applause] so hopefully by now you've had a chance to build your dome so i thought i'd just give you a quick presentation on the history of geodesic domes and the man who kind of popularized them back in the 1950s and 60s so the geodesic dome was actually invented in 1923 by a german engineer called warfare bowersfeld he worked at the time for a company called zeiss who made lenses for cameras and telescopes and projectors they're still in existence today and they probably make the camera that's inside your smartphone they wanted to build a planetarium at the time to show off their latest projector so walther decided that a dome would be the best shape it was also going to be the quickest and easiest construction method now the planetarium was built on the roof of the zeiss factory and they made it from metal rods and then coated it in concrete when it was finished the general public flocked to see the futuristic structure on the roof and the astronomy show that was shown inside unfortunately unfortunately it was so popular that after three years they had to knock down the dome on the roof and rebuild it in a park outside the town just to accommodate all the crowds after that we had world war ii and geodesic domes kind of got forgotten about until a man named bucky rediscovered them in 1950 so who was bucky well richard buckminster fuller to give him his proper name he was an engineer an architect an inventor designer and a futurist bucky was born in 1895 and he died in 1983 age 87. he preferred to be called bucky all his life nobody ever called him richard he always was called bucky when he was only 28 years old he invented what he called the car of the future which he called the dymaxion car and the maxion stood for dynamic maximum tension now it had two wheels at the front and one wheel at the back and people who drove it were very tense because the car swayed about wildly if driven really fast only three of the cars were ever made because they all crashed now bucky had lots of ideas lots and lots of big ideas one of his big ideas in the 1950s and 60s was to try and do more with less he was very concerned that humans were using too much of the earth's natural resources now you have to remember this is a long time before we even thought of global warming and the climate change and things like that he was worried that the environment was getting destroyed by uh advances in technology and humans he coined the term spaceship earth and wrote a handbook for it the operating manual for spaceship earth now walt disney was so impressed he decided to build a whole section in disneyland called spaceship earth in a center called the epcot center which stood for the experimental community of tomorrow it was going to be the sort of ideal way we were going to live in the future one of bucky's biggest ideas was for affordable housing he used the dymaxium concept to create what he called the dymaxion house this house unlike usual houses which were built on site was to be built in a factory in sections and then assembled on site very quickly only a few of the houses remain intact today but they were circular and kind of dome-shaped roofs and they inspired the idea in him for the geodesic dome so in 1954 bucky patented a design for a geodesic dome he was taking an idea that engineers used to use to build bridges called trusses and he put a group of triangles together in a certain shape and arrangement to create a sphere or a ball shape so the geodesic dome had some amazing properties um it was extremely strong but it was also lightweight the triangles created a very stable structure and the sphere creates the largest amount of space for the least amount of surface area now the basic geometry of a geodesic dome is based on a shape called an icosahedron a funny word icosahedron the icosahedron is made up of 20 equilateral triangles now that's triangles where all the sides have the same length when you increase the number or the frequency of triangles inside one of the original triangle shapes the overall shape gets more complex if you look at the picture on the right hand side you can see the basic shape of an icosahedron and inside one of the triangles there's it's been kind of subdivided by three green triangles now you can keep dividing and dividing and dividing and adding more triangles or increasing the frequency of triangles and as you do so the shape becomes more complex and as you add more and more triangles it becomes more ball or dome shaped our dome kit that we've built has two different triangle shapes and it's called a v2 frequency dome you can have v3 v4 v5 all the way up to lots of higher numbers and as the more triangles you add the more complex and larger the dome can become [Music] so in the late 1960s and 70s dome building reached a peak with geodesic domes being built for everything from restaurants sports arenas to houses and even an antarctic base station that antarctic base station has actually been standing for over 30 years and it's get beaten about by some of the worst weather in the world and yet it's still standing so just goes to show how strong domes are now if you're wondering where i can see a dome other than the one that you've just built there is actually a geodesic dome not far from uh manor hamilton in the organic center in rosimva they built a geodesic dome and they turned it into a greenhouse gtc domes have been used in people's gardens as greenhouses for for quite a while okay thanks for watching and hope you had fun building your geodesic dome kit well we'd love to see some of the domes that you've made and maybe even if you could decorate them in some way paint them or cover them in something that would be really good too if you want to take a picture of them and post them onto our facebook page the address is on the screen right now post a picture there and we'll be sure to take a look so everybody have a really good summer and enjoy yourselves bye

Channel: Fab Lab Maker Hub

Views: 17,573

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

Keywords: Geodesic, dome, fablab, maker, buckminster, bucky, icosahedron, geometric

Id: 4eaYNY7kMy4

Length: 33min 51sec (2031 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020