mxa's blog

I found instructions for building a nice bamboo dome on Tara Landry's Desert Domes site. Though this has nothing to do with my dome tent project, I was curious as to how the finished bamboo dome would look. For less than €2, I bought two packs of 18 cm bamboo skewers from the supermarket and went to work. I used small metal wire bag binders to tie the crosses. The legs of the crosses are connected using masking tape.

As always with dome structures, the dome was quite unstable at first, but it got more and more rigid as it neared completion. The finished, 72 cm wide dome is strong and light and can be lifted by any vertex. The lengths of bamboo weave over and under each other, creating a nice, even tension throughout the structure (click the picture on the right to get a bigger image).