Marcin Jakubowski - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - is the point of contact I have for the team that built it but I think they're hard at work on other things right now :-)
I'm hopeful we'll get more pictures and notes soon. In general - and I can't stress this too much - you have to check this stuff with qualified professionals before putting anybody's life on the line. Including your own, please. At Burning Man building in Tuff-R if the building fails you might get hit by a 5lb roof board or your stuff might all blow away, but it's quite unlikely anybody is going to get seriously injured by a hexayurt failure. The only risk we saw was fire, and we've got big notices on the site advising on best practices for reducing fire risk and disclaiming responsibility. So, on to plywood. A plywood roof cone is going to weight something in the region of 180 - 300 lbs. On the other hand, a moderate to heavy snow load (10 lbs per foot) would add 1660 lbs to the weight on the roof cone. At that point, if it *does* fail, it's going to be bad. My guess - and this is purely a guess, based on my engineering intuition, is that 1" marine ply with very strong metal fasteners and beveled board edges to ensure full contact between the edges of all the boards - will be more than good enough to sustain that kind of snow load. But we'd need to do some engineering drawings and have a chartered engineer or something similar compute snow loads and rubber stamp the plans as "this will not fall over" before I'd feel comfortable saying "you can build it's reasonably safe." Because snow is *very* heavy, and buildings designed to withstand big snow have to be engineered. Other things that might help - the Pentayurt has a much steeper roof angle, so will accumulate less snow, although it's obviously a little smaller. Same amount of headroom over the 6' line, interestingly - the steeper roof helps. http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/index.php?s=pentayurt&submit=Search Really, though, by the time we start talking plywood, we're at the limits of my engineering capability. From here on in it needs people who actually know *buildings* to do some analysis and offer an opinion. Sorry I can't be more help, but hopefully the Power of Free/Open Source will get us some analysis, and then people can build these everywhere. Vinay -- Vinay Gupta Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851 Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk : hexayurt Icelandic Cell : (+354) 869-4605 "If it doesn't fit, force it." On Sep 30, 2008, at 4:08 PM, Caroline Tigeress wrote: > > > > On Sep 29, 2:00 pm, Vinay Gupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> (note: reply all includes mailing lists, be aware.) >> >> Actually OSB , but it's a very similar material. >> between improvised hexayurts, which are largely built in place, and >> the deploy-and-redeploy fast-up fast-down folding models which need >> some factory details. >> >> Vinay >> >> Hexayurt building went well - a 7/16″ Oriented Strand Board >> (OSB) >> structure with 4 inch wide, 32 gage galvanized flashing as the >> 'tape' to hold it together. Being familiar with standard >> construction methods, I had my doubts concerning the structural >> integrity of a tension srtucture. I have been converted after this >> project. >> >> The opposing walls gave strength to each other and to the roof. Once >> all panels were in place they could support people walking on top. >> Using minimal resources we were able to construct a space of 166 sq >> feet in two full days - at a cost of $132 for panels and flashing- >> not considering paint, tar, screws, nails, and 2×4s used in >> the walls. > > Very cool. I was thinking about using this concept in Eastern > Washington - but we have some healthy snow loads there. Do you think > this could take such things? I'd be going with 8' wide (4 x 8) type > dimensions. Can you also elaborate a little bit more about the 2 x > 4's in the walls? > > Thanks, > Caroline > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hexayurt" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hexayurt?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
