In 2004, we built a very nice Dome. It was a group effort, and it took a group to set up. In 2005, my girlfriend and I decided to go by ourselves. Setting up the dome was out of the question given the amount of work involved.

After finishing the Chess Tables for BackSpace, I had less than two weeks before Burning Man. This shouldn't have been enough time to get everything ready let alone build a shade structure from scratch. To further complicate matters my girlfriend was extremely busy at work and wouldn’t be able to help.

I decided to try anyway, I would work on it for 7 days and at that point I would decide if it would be worth bringing, or something that needed to be saved for next year. Due to the rush I didn’t have time to take many photos but I will try to describe the construction as best I can. If you have any questions please feel free to email me.
LostMachine (at) gmail (dot) com.

The design had to be simple and construction also needed to be undemanding. What I came up with is a simple framed cube. In the finished photos it is hard to gauge the size. This photo gives an idea as to the scale when compared to my house.

I had a lot of 10 foot by 3 1/2 inch angle iron, (saved from a scrap bin). The angle iron had a lot of 3/4 inch holes already drilled into it. I used as many of these as I could to save time. Every right angle got a 3 to 5 foot cross brace bolted into it. On top of the cube I put a single sheet of 3/4 inch plywood to make a loft. A ladder was strapped onto the frame to reach the loft.

In this poorly drawn graphic the white lines are angle iron and the red lines represent guy ropes.

From each upper corner two guy ropes are carried down to steel stakes in the ground. With the guy ropes in place the shape is similar to the upper third of a Small Rhombicuboctahedron. On the top square another piece of angle iron provides a center pole for a pyramid. More guy ropes are used to frame a pyramid. Each rope was tensioned with a three way trucker knot. The stakes are made up of 30 inch pieces of 2 1/4 inch angle iron that was pounded a minimum of 24 inches into the playa. To make sure the structure was secured, 10 of these stakes were used. One for each guy rope and two in the direction or the prevailing winds. A come-a-long cable tensioning device was uses on the heavy wind side.

The covering is made up of 9 panels. The panels are sewn up from old hotel bed sheets. Two good friends happen to have a truckload of these bed sheets; they donated two full bags for the project. I attached one panel before leaving to test the method of connecting the panels. To attach the panels: fabric at several points was pulled and twisted into two loops. Two zip ties go through the loops one is pulled tight to keep the fabric in the loops while the other zip tie is used to connect the panel to the structure. This spreads out the load across many threads. Three to four points along each edge were connected in this fashion. Safety pins were then used to fill in the spaces between the zip ties.

When it gets set up again I will take more pictures, but this will have to do for now.

Project completed 8/24/2005

Last updated 1/18/06