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building a shelter
Nov. 15th, 2011 11:25 amSeveral years ago, (2006? Yikes!) I came back from burning man and saw all the corrugated plastic signs on the side of the road and said to myself, "This is a wasted resource, it should be built with". And I gathered up a bunch of them and discarded the lumber elements and used only the cut signs.
...which made perfect sense to me at the time. The job then was domes, and to have used the sticks would have meant sawing those sticks with annoying precision into weird angles, and I was all about using the carpet knife. So I used a special kind of expensive tape to hold it all together.
...and then I got discouraged and distracted and gave up for a while, and managed to forget my enormous stockpile of around 400 signs I had stacked up in the back yard.
But then somewhere along the line I stumbled onto the hexayurt and it got me to thinking about using those signs for something again.
And I really started to kick myself for having burned up all those sticks as firewood. I realized that if I designed the thing correctly, I could make a shelter out of nothing except the sticks and panels and screws that came off the signs themselves.
The first version took the better part of a week to bang together. I had gone to the hardware store to buy new wood, but then chickened out when I saw they wanted $1.50 per stick! Instead, I bought a bunch of furring strips for about twelve bucks. they are as long and as wide as the sign posts, just not as thick.
the mark 2 shed took two days to build. I could have done it in one day, except I ran out of sign material and had to go gather stuff. both the mark 1 and the mark 2 I took to Occupy Seattle to show them off and hopefully give people ideas. I don't know if either are still standing now.
And somewhere in all of that I came down with a cold, and I just couldn't get out there like I wanted to. And the election came and went, and just when I wanted most to be zipping around scooping up road spam, I was home resting. Yesterday I tried to go out and gather signs, but the weekend had passed and the political volunteers had got there before me. My total haul was something like 6 signs.
That's OK. I have enough material to build a mark 3 if I want. And it was a really good lesson in design. I thought I could bang together something that would work in the field and be easy to move. But it's harder than it looks! Each piece of wood needs at least 2, often 4 precision cuts if they are to go together smoothly. While I'm happy to do that in my nice dry garage, I don't know how much fun that will be for someone on out there on their own.
if this idea were to catch on, it might involve a group of do-gooders gathering the signs, taking them back to a shop and fabricating a bunch of sheds at once, and then going out and deploying these things where they'd be useful. Which is a bit bigger than a one man operation. (not that much bigger. three people could do a *lot*)
There may yet be a no-saw design waiting to be discovered. If all you needed was to drill a few holes, this could be done out in the rain by one person by themselves. I just need to re-think the geometry some more.
And it sucks that I don't have any pictured to post. The object I'm talking about is the size of a tent, there's room to stretch out on the diagonal, and almost enough to stand up. without a coat of oil paint to cover up the graphics, it's ugly as hell. But then, that's part of the point, to embarrass the political class.
I've got the blueprints all in my head, though. Maybe next time I can get someone with a camera to follow along.
...which made perfect sense to me at the time. The job then was domes, and to have used the sticks would have meant sawing those sticks with annoying precision into weird angles, and I was all about using the carpet knife. So I used a special kind of expensive tape to hold it all together.
...and then I got discouraged and distracted and gave up for a while, and managed to forget my enormous stockpile of around 400 signs I had stacked up in the back yard.
But then somewhere along the line I stumbled onto the hexayurt and it got me to thinking about using those signs for something again.
And I really started to kick myself for having burned up all those sticks as firewood. I realized that if I designed the thing correctly, I could make a shelter out of nothing except the sticks and panels and screws that came off the signs themselves.
The first version took the better part of a week to bang together. I had gone to the hardware store to buy new wood, but then chickened out when I saw they wanted $1.50 per stick! Instead, I bought a bunch of furring strips for about twelve bucks. they are as long and as wide as the sign posts, just not as thick.
the mark 2 shed took two days to build. I could have done it in one day, except I ran out of sign material and had to go gather stuff. both the mark 1 and the mark 2 I took to Occupy Seattle to show them off and hopefully give people ideas. I don't know if either are still standing now.
And somewhere in all of that I came down with a cold, and I just couldn't get out there like I wanted to. And the election came and went, and just when I wanted most to be zipping around scooping up road spam, I was home resting. Yesterday I tried to go out and gather signs, but the weekend had passed and the political volunteers had got there before me. My total haul was something like 6 signs.
That's OK. I have enough material to build a mark 3 if I want. And it was a really good lesson in design. I thought I could bang together something that would work in the field and be easy to move. But it's harder than it looks! Each piece of wood needs at least 2, often 4 precision cuts if they are to go together smoothly. While I'm happy to do that in my nice dry garage, I don't know how much fun that will be for someone on out there on their own.
if this idea were to catch on, it might involve a group of do-gooders gathering the signs, taking them back to a shop and fabricating a bunch of sheds at once, and then going out and deploying these things where they'd be useful. Which is a bit bigger than a one man operation. (not that much bigger. three people could do a *lot*)
There may yet be a no-saw design waiting to be discovered. If all you needed was to drill a few holes, this could be done out in the rain by one person by themselves. I just need to re-think the geometry some more.
And it sucks that I don't have any pictured to post. The object I'm talking about is the size of a tent, there's room to stretch out on the diagonal, and almost enough to stand up. without a coat of oil paint to cover up the graphics, it's ugly as hell. But then, that's part of the point, to embarrass the political class.
I've got the blueprints all in my head, though. Maybe next time I can get someone with a camera to follow along.
