2020 Update!

After 13 years, it was time to redo the geodesic dome.  Part of the reason is that Sarah is leaving home for college in the fall, and this would be our last time to relive our father-daughter project of her early childhood.
The original plan was to build the dome in September 2019, around the time of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.  The original dome had never been pronounced a "kosher" sukkah, but I thought it had a certain spiritual energy to it and it did encourage socializing outdoors!

Sarah helping the build, 13 years later!
Note that gophers have been having their way with my lawn!

Therefore I produced a new set of bamboo poles and glued hundreds of eyelet rings.  The hardest part of the new production was probably renting a miter saw from Home Depot; I have since acquired one for the home. I attempted a solo build over two hot afternoons of a 5/8 3V dome.  I started popping rings off the poles and got frustrated and quit!
Thinking more about this, I realized that I could leave off the bottom row of the dome and make I guess a 4/8 (1/2) 3V dome with fewer struts and less overhead reaching, so that became the new plan.  The target was to build in April for Earth Day.
Why Earth Day?  I don't consider myself much of an environmentalist but the dome seems fitting for that moment.
This time, the build would be a project for two. The quarantine slowed all of our schedules down to the point where a build was feasible.  We chose a fresh April morning during spring break.
The build this time only took about 2.5 hours.  We built one "level" at a time. There were only four levels.
The dome doesn't look like much as it's being built.  The two mantras of building the dome are 1. The just keep swimming mentality, don't worry too much that it looks terrible as its being build and 2. Don't make the ties too tight initially because the rings will pop out of the bamboo.
We tightened the loose spots after the structure was complete.  There are still a few cave in spots.
The project went a lot better with help, and making a less ambitious dome made the project go faster. The final height of the dome is around 7 feet.
Distancing means no way to enjoy being in the dome with family and friends, but at least social media offers a way to show the handiwork.  Yay math!
Sukkot 2020 here we come!

2007 Update

The new sukkah is up! The whole process took two days, today (Wednesday) and two days ago (Monday).

I had some new insights this year.

The initial build process is stressful. Tying the sticks together takes about three hours. It should be done in one "sitting," since if you leave off in the middle, it will take about 20 minutes the next day to reorient yourself to where you left off. It should probably be done alone, though kids like to tie some ties, and probably can't cause too much trouble by tying a few.

It helps to have extra (spare) struts. I stupidly got rid of all of the extra bamboo sticks from last year, so I had no way to make extras. I should have made about ten extras of each type of strut.

The reason for this is that the build process inevitably breaks struts. They are somewhat fragile, and the rings pop out of the sticks when stressed. You can repair them with a little Gorilla Glue (gloves!), but it's a lot easier if you have extra struts available.

It helps to have grown-ups helping to hold up parts of the structure while you are adding struts. This helps you orient locations for new struts as you build. I suppose it's less critical to hold up the structure if you have a very good spatial 3d sense, but I don't. It's not critical to hold up the dome during the building phase, and may actually damage struts with abnormal pressures, so I say if it wants to fall, let it. As long as you understand what section you're building, save the loft part for the tightening phase.

Once the entire framework is built, it will look terrible, you will feel terrible, and the kids will be despondent. This is ok. Don't despair. The dome doesn't magically loft itself. You have to tighten it.

If you did your job right, the struts will be very loose. You did that to minimize ring poppage while assembling. Now that the assembly is built, go around tightening the ties around the dome. Like the assembly process, start at the bottom and work your way up. Push the dome up from the inside, and evaluate not that joint, but the ones it's attached to. Tighten the loose joints, and repeat. Try to avoid any stressful movements--you will get a feel for how the dome likes to be pushed, and how it complains.

The dome has a mind of its own. Pushing or tightening a joint in one location can have a profound impact on another unrelated location. It's like the butterfly wing flap causing a tsunami--very new-agey! Contemplate the sound of one hand clapping.

The finishing process is an iterative process: push on the loosest joint, the one that buckles down all the time, tighten its neighbors, then tighten that joint. Each joint has two conformations: in (drooping) and out (lofted). The goal is to tie the joint in such a way that the lofted conformation is the lowest-energy condition. The dome wants to loft, but you just have to give it a little encouragement. You have to care about the dome. See a loose joint? Tighten it. Sometimes you have to cut a tie to move a ring to a better location in a joint. Sometimes you have to tie and retie a joint. I have some joints with five or six cable ties holding them together. Pretty ugly, but they are tight. Little by little, you realize the structure is more solid, sags less, feels sturdier. Small sags can lead to big instability until even the small sags are gone. You can spend 30 minutes just fine-tuning small sags.

It helps to have a (low-key) friend help with the tightening process. You want someone who will hold up one section while you tighten another section. As you tighten more and more, he will have to hold less and less.

Remember, if the joint starts out really tight, the rings will pop when you move the struts. You'll have to move struts around to add new sections, but try not to move the dome too much, and use people, ladders, etc. to support sagging structures. If you leave a lot of sag for overnight, expect broken rings in the morning.

The build process took about five hours total this year. I broke about six sticks, four the first day and two the second day. The dome is now holding with two struts missing. One strut I jury-rigged out of cable ties connecting two joints, and the other I just left off. These are the very last two struts, so if any of the bamboo breaks, I have no more dome. I worry about next year, though maybe we'd be better off with a metal dome!

Next year, I will probably start before Yom Kippur. The key is to allow enough time. It's stressful, because when the struts are loose you wonder how that thing is ever going to stand up, and you don't know whether to invite people over if your dome is more like a carpet.

Part 4: Construction and Enjoyment

The construction part of the job was actually the least difficult and most enjoyable. You can see I enlisted the help of a four-year-old "assistant" who tied a few of the early cable ties. Desertdomes.com gives detailed "blueprints" on how to actually build the dome, and the plan was pretty self-explanatory. A few tips to remember for next year (more for my own reference, but if anyone else is silly enough to try this, here you go...)




1. If you tie the cable ties are too tight, the eyelets will pull out of the struts, and you will have to reglue the broken eyelets. The trick is to cinch the cable ties tight enough to hold the structure together loosely, but not so tight that the eyelets will pull out. Once the dome is up, then you can go around tightening the ties, or even tying new ones. This sounds a lot harder than it actually is, because the cable ties are pretty flexible, so they allow quite a bit of movement as you build.

2. It helps to have a (grown-up) friend to help you hold up part of the structure on one side as you connect the other side.

3. You'll need a ladder to connect up the top.

4. I used Sears tent pegs to hold down the base--this step is actually pretty important even if you're not worried about wind because the base will tend to wiggle as you assemble the structure. The little stubs on the ends of the pegs fit into the rings on the bottom ring.

5. I haven't found a tool dedicated to removing cable ties, so I got a wire cutter at Home Depot. I think disassembling the structure is going to be a pain.

So far, we have had ten families or so over the sukkah. Every single person's reaction, from soccer moms to retired folks, has been, "How'd you do that? That's pretty cool!" That's the main thing I was hoping for. You can see that we wired the sukkah up for lights, and the effect is neat. So far, more than 17 kids have come through the sukkah, and it's still standing. I had to turn off the sprinklers for the whole property, but I have a small lot, and this hasn't had any deleterious consequences as far as I can see.

People tend to be pretty relaxed in the dome, and many a friendly beer and meal has been shared in it.

Considering the amount of time and money I put into it, it's been a rewarding task. Some visitors have encouraged me to keep it up full time.

I claim to people that this is the world's only bamboo geodesic dome sukkah. I have yet to find evidence to the contrary.

You can see that four card tables and a kiddie table can fit into the dome with no difficulty.

Step 3: Glue the eyelets

Now for the part I did today. I invited my father-in-law (neighbor not too keen on hours of tedious labor) for: free lunch at his favorite place, Follow Your Heart, and free brewskies, in quid-pro-quo for helping me glue 330 eyelets in 165 bamboo poles. He assented readily, but complained after we were done.

It took us about three hours, working in assembly-line fashion: he applied glue to the hollow bamboo tube, and reamed out any pith that might be there, and I stuck the eyelet in the hole and applied more glue.

The hardest part for me was finding a place to lay all those poles flat. Eventually, I settled on the lawn behind my house, since it's flat, and the grass seemed to support the rings nicely.

The trick is to lay the sticks so that the eyelets are parallel. Most of the time, the big end of the bamboo was too big for even a #4 eyelet, while the small end took a #8 eyelet easily, for example. This means there is plenty of wiggle-room, so rest the sticks on the ground carefully!

The major problem was nodes. The node of the bamboo rod is solid wood, and doesn't like to have an eyelet screwed into it. The stick cracks if you screw too hard, basically. A cracked stick is not very supportive, though I did experiment a little with sealing cracks with glue. Basically this sealing process created a mess, with Gorilla Glue all over, and I have yet to examine closely the finished result. Better to drill holes in the ten or twenty sticks that have a node in the wrong place. This was a little frustrating. Next time, when you're cutting sticks, make a separate pile for the ones with nodes on the ends, and just drill small holes in these.

Besides making a bloody mess, the operation was successful. Gorilla Glue is very messy, and it doesn't combine well with newsprint. My fingers got pretty dirty from laying the rods on newspaper, and the dirt didn't wash off with soap, water, alcohol, windex, formula 409, or nail polish remover. So heed the warning--wear gloves for the gluing process and even for cleanup.

The reason the Gorilla Glue is so desireable is that it foams. I tried Titebond wood glue, DAP caulk, and another brand of caulk, but the Gorilla Glue won the contract for me. It's more expensive than the other glues out there, but it is best suited for this task, by far.

Day 2 update: all the rings stayed in the holes, and stayed straight. The glue foamed, and everything is super solid x 165 struts. The best place to put the drying rods is on (clean) grass, since this eliminates the newsprint problem. Try not to move the drying struts around before they are dry, since then you have to reorient the rings to be parallel.

The rings are parallel with the struts, while desertdomes.com recommends a 20-degree offset. I think the flexibility of the bamboo will (hopefully) compensate for the flatness of the rings, though we will find out when I construct the dome.

Step 2: Cut the wood

Beg borrow or steal (ok, so if you steal to make a sukkah, it's probably not Kosher) a table saw. You want one with a finely serrated blade. You do not want to split the bamboo when you cut it, so heed the advice.

Also, when working with bamboo, probably a good idea to wear gloves. I got a nasty splinter from handling the bamboo rods!

Make a measured set of bamboo sticks to act as your "A" and "B" (and even "C", if applicable) templates (I think this is called a "jig" in the construction world).

Don't slice off your finger, like this poor guy (G-rated), who actually didn't let a woodworking sliced finger stop him from racing hundreds of miles across the Alaskan wilderness pulled by a pack of dogs! I learned that the Iditarod is actually going on now, as I construct my sukkah! Cool!

The wood-cutting part takes about an hour or two, depending on what kind of dome sukkah you're building.

Step 1: Shopping

Here's a basic shopping list:

Item Quantity Total Price
Bamboo, 1/2" x 4ft 250 $40
Gorilla Glue, 4oz 2 $14
Eyelets, #4, box of 25 6 $37
Eyelets, #6, box of 25 3 $15
Eyelets, #8, box of 50 2 $12
Cable ties, 7.5", pack of 100, 4 $23
UV-resistant (black)

Total price $149

The bamboo came from Butler Bamboo in Santa Ana. They sell to the public, are open weekdays 8:30 - 4, and even take credit cards. They have a good website.

Oh, you also need a table saw to cut the bamboo to the proper dimensions, and gloves when working with the Gorilla Glue. Can't emphasize that enough--even the cleanup part--wear gloves. The stuff is sticky and messy, and you don't want it on your hands.

The cable ties are in the electrical department at Home Depot.

The bulk packs of eyelets are not available at Lowes--it's better to go to the Depot for the eyelets.

Step 0: Planning

Step zero is the planning. You really only need two websites to guide you (and not even this blog, per se, though this is the only sukkah-oriented dome resource on the web so far).

The first is a brilliant website produced by a Burning Man guru. Burning Man is an art and hippie show held in the desert outside Reno, Nevada, and apparently, people build and live in Geodesic Domes during the event.

The dome guru, Tara Landry, has created probably the most comprehensive dome resource on the internet, at www.desertdomes.com. She has been doing this for about ten years, she is an engineer, and she will even sell you a dome for Burning Man, which I think just finished last week.

The coolest part of the website is the calculator; just tell it how large you want the radius to be, and it tells you how big each structural element should be. I figured a radius of eight feet should be plenty big. You can figure out which kind of dome you want to make, and they increase in complexity from "1V" to "6V." I thought for my first time, I would take the middle road and make a 5/8 3V dome. This requires 165 struts, and twice as many connectors. You can also print out the construction plan for your dome from the site, which is good for impressing people with the grandiosity of your plans.

The other great website for dome-building information comes courtesy of the people at Make magazine (I think). The DIY-science author Gavin D. J. Harper demonstrates how he built a decent-looking 2V dome out of bamboo sticks and Home Depot eyelets.



So, if you can calculate the dome on one website, and learn how to put it together on the other website, what would stop you from making a geodesic dome sukkah in the same way?

Really, nothing...

Rationale

Hi. I'm your ordinary overachieving Jewish doctor sukkah constructor. With one important difference. I'm 3/4 of the way to building a geodesic dome sukkah. This is my story.

Sukkot is the Jewish holiday of communing with nature. It's one of the harvest festivals, and in this holiday, Jews are commanded to essentially live in a hut outdoors. The only rules about building such a hut are that it should have an open roof, it should have at least three walls, and that it should not be permanent. It should also be big enough to sleep in. Notice that there's no reason that the hut, called a Sukkah, could't be a geodesic dome.

We have this meeting with other young Jewish families every few months called "Living a Jewish Life." In the meeting, we sit around in a circle, and everyone describes the rituals they partook growing up, while learning from the rabbi new and interesting facts about the Jewish holidays. He encourages us to develop new rituals for our families. So at our latest meeting, in the closing minutes, he asked, "I need four families to commit to building a sukkah this year. Who's up for it?" He eyed the circle worriedly. Two hands went up.

My neighbor said from across the circle, "Mike, you do it. I'll help you." Now he and I usually have a good time together, and what better excuse to hang out with the guys and drink beer could there be than to build a sukkah?

I have to admit, leading up to this, that I do not have what would be called a "strong" belief in God, or even organized religion, for that matter. I would justify those beliefs with the Problem of Evil, aka theodicy, and the horrible things happening around the world in the name of religion or God. Many things have been written about these issues, and I am not interested in discussing those here. Suffice to say that a strong religiousity isn't what drove me to build a sukkah. Mainly, it seemed like a cool thing to do at the time.

So then one goes on the internet and looks at sukkah.com (send us money and we'll send you a kit). So then one asks some of the other Jewish doctors at the hospital, "Have you ever built a sukkah?" Many had, but not for years. Suggestions included PVC pipe, 2x4s. Would one need a power saw to cut the 2x4s? Hell no! Use a regular saw!

Well, I could see where this was going. A crummy-looking, small sukkah that would take me hours of sweaty aggravation. I even have a history working with PVC, having built my own lawn irrigation system during residency (turned out pretty lousy, but it did have a backflow-prevention device where it hooked onto the hose bib on the side of the house). I thought a PVC sukkah would be pretty disappointing; here are some plans I found: http://www.traditionsrenewed.com/holidays/sukkahplan.html

I think a PVC sukkah would be pretty cheap to build, not take too long, and not require excessive physical labor or power tools.

But then I started thinking about domes. A dome would be much cooler-looking than an ordinary sukkah. There was one tantalizing report on the web of one person, a guy in Palo Alto, who built a dome sukkah and apparently got his rabbi to confirm it was kosher (a conservative rabbi, no less).

Searching the halacha on the internet, it seems like the main rules are these (as above):
Make it big enough to sleep in.
Make it have at least three walls.
Leave the roof more open than closed, and don't put anything that doesn't grow in the ground over the top of the roof.

I didn't ask my rabbis locally what they thought, out of fear that they would laugh or discourage me.

So if bamboo could be used as schach, why not a geodesic dome sukkah? Why not also demonstrate that the Jewish faith is resilient enough to encompass new ideas in architecture? And why stop at architecture? Ilan Ramon, who I named my son after, took Shabbat to a new height when he went into orbit, assummarized in this post hosted by Chabad, published originally in 2003. Of course, redefining our faith in a modern era is short step away from assimilating, but wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to embrace the precepts of science and mathematics, and still make a meaningful observation of a Jewish holiday? Somehow, a dome sukkah made out of bamboo seems more in keeping with the original concepts of the holiday than a PVC pipe hut.

I wonder what the dome will sound like when the wind blows through it. Every afternoon, around 3PM, the winds pick up. I notice the trees moving from the exam room window, as I'm usually with patients at that hour. Sometimes, the hot winds come down from Santa Ana, and then there's a dry wind all day. The Santa Ana winds bring fire with them; bamboo is flammable, so there will be no smoking allowed in the bamboo dome sukkah! Apparently, there is a way to fireproof bamboo, but that probably won't be necessary in this case. I should warn neighbors to be aware that the dome is at risk if falling embers engulf the neighborhood.

I purposely didn't ask the Homeowners' Association if the dome is o.k. It's temporary, not visible from the street, and part of a religious celebration. I doubt anyone would have a major problem, especially since everyone's Jewish on this block.

I would like to get some publicity for the dome sukkah idea. If anyone knows a newspaper person, I think it would make a "feelgood" story for the religious section how there's a slightly nutty doctor who built a geodesic dome in his backyard for sukkah. This is, as far as I know, the first 5/8 3V bamboo geodesic dome sukkah anywhere in the world!