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Dome Projection

Domes - cover

Domes - frames

Drilling & bending
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...
posted on Saturday, May 07, 2005 5:26 PM

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# re: Drilling & bending 5/9/2005 11:19 AM bigmac
There is also a special bit for electric drills which has the same purpose of removing burrs; this bit is also used for countersinking screws. You could use a thick drill (in your case 10 mm or so) for removing the burrs, but for countersinking you need the special tool. (It has to match the angle of the screw head.)


# re: Drilling & bending 5/15/2005 12:58 PM mxa
Good tip! The tool I used is actually a manual countersinking tool. I didn't know electric drill bit versions are available (but that makes sense, of course).

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