View Single Post
Old 09-01-2012, 04:20 PM   #30 (permalink)
freebeard
Master EcoModder
 
freebeard's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2012
Location: northwest of normal
Posts: 27,561
Thanks: 7,736
Thanked 8,554 Times in 7,041 Posts
Quote:
Drop city was great, love the alternative building materials. If I only had a buddy with a junkyard!
Car tops are great because they are already painted and undercoated, but you could do the same with sheet metal. My concern would be that the gauge of ducting metal might not be up to the stresses out on the road. One construction detail Fuller used was to turn 2 non-coplanar triangles into a tetrahedron. This would be a bazillion times stronger than 2 layers flat against each other.

Quote:
Now, since the body will be tacked to the frame, what method of sealing the seams could be used?
Jeez, I don't know. With flanged triangles you could be spot-welding on the inside every 3/8".

So here's a suggestion for a hybrid construction: Conduit and simple curves combined with geodesics. The edge lengths of the triangles are mathematically calculable, or you could wrap strings around a football to represent the geodesic lines and pick the dimensions off with a tape measure.



I'm going to go off and do something else now. I'll check back later.
  Reply With Quote