Cover Material Arrives

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 Tuesday 16th Feb 2021 the polythene material for the geodome cover arrives. 

Delivered by Liam of Allens of Allenbridge  by car.

  • 13 m x 8m = 104 sq metres of high quality UV stabilised polythene.
  • 9 rolls of 20m x 0.1m repair tape


Material is light but very strong and pretty much as expected. The rolls of tape are made in France and I'm assured stronger than the polythene it is designed to join.


The tape is semi-transparent and also UV stabilised and hopefully will not stick out too much as the tape joins are coincedent with the spars (sticks) of the geodome structure. 

In the next couple of days some initial trial will be run to assess the flexibility of the taped joints....which I think will determine the maximum size of the geodome cover sections.

Update on the 'sticks'

Well, I grew old and impatient waiting for the larger dowel diameters ordered a few weeks ago. Another victim of Brexit, the stick were apparently stuck in customs. Soooo....I cancelled the order found an old 28mm diameter curtain rod and sanded it down to acheive the desired diameters of approx 22-24mm.

To help with this large amount of material removal I rigged up my electric drill with a sanding disc attachment and mounted it on my vice. Then switched it on and relatively quickly and easily ground down to the correct diameters. Was pretty dodgy at first but you quickly develop a technique to spin the pole whilst you grind to get an approximate circular finish which you can fine tune by hand using sandpaper.


Anyway, this is a good labour/time saving method and if you dont have a wide range of dowel diameters to hand ....definitely a cheap alternative to speeding up the process. (sanding disc attachement was approx 10 euro from Halfords)

Bottom line is I have all sticks ready and apart from finalising the door structure am ready to go.







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