The Frame is Finished!

The structure frame is finished! It involved a lot of cutting, welding, and milling to get there. It’s a struct and connector design. The connectors are pieces of SCH80 pipe and 2.5” tube, cut at the right angles and welded together. 3-way connectors are all SCH80 pipe. The 4-way connectors in the middle of the structure are a combination of SCH80 and 2.5” pipe because trying to do a 4-way mitered joint with round pipe at strange angles is damn hard. I might write a later blog post about our adventures reaching that conclusion.

The next step is setting up a wooden framing inside the steel frame. The steel bears the weight, but how do you attach things do it? Mike came up with a great idea: put flanges (thin, flat pieces of metal) in each angle of each connector. Now, each face (the lower trapezoids, upper trapezoids, and top hexagon) now have a flat bit of metal each each corner. Put holes in these flanges, so you can put a bolt through them. Then, put two pieces of wood, one on each side, and bolt them together through the flange. How you have a steel outer frame, with a wooden inner frame. How, we can start mounting things on the wooden frame. For the upper panels, where people might stand, we can use 1 1/8” plywood that rests on the frame itself.

So now we need to make the flanges and weld them to the connectors. Doing this means making a design and cutting it out of steel plate. Since there are strange angles (117 degrees), a plasma cutter is the tool of choice. So I learned how to use a plasma cutter today and ordered parts to do the cuts (you scale up the amperage depending on material thickness and I need 30A parts). I’ve made the designs and bought the steel. Hopefully this Sunday will have the flanges ready for Yariv to weld!