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Dome Projection

Domes - cover

Domes - frames

Saturday, May 07, 2005 #

Drilling the pipes is easy, with a tool like this: a drill press. The 5.5 mm drill bit went through the pipes like a hot knife through butter. I bolted some wooden placeholders to the drilling table so that each hole would be 2 cm from the end of the pipe.

Perhaps the best thing about the drill press was that it made very little noise...
Whenever you drill aluminium, you get burrs. I found a handy little tool that you can twist around in the freshly drilled hole to remove any burrs. This actually takes more time than the drilling itself, but I don't want to cut my hands when I'm assembling the dome.
I bent all pipe ends, in order to make it easier to bolt them together. 20 pipes make up a circle, so two pipes meet at a 16 degree angle, which translates to 8 degrees per pipe end. I put the anvil/vise next to a table, clamped each end into it and bent the pipe to a mark I had made on the table's edge.

And here they are: the pipes after squashing, drilling and bending.

Drilling, de-burring and bending all 262 pipes took me about 8 hours today. In addition to the time spent flattening the pipes and buying/making tools and materials, I think I've spent about 20 hours in total on this project. That's excluding the design time, however...
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