Hello there,

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I had already read your parachute advice page @ timefold, but we bought one anyway because it is by far the cheapest and easiest immediate solution for covering a dome this big. We are going to try it out before we bring the dome out of the backyard. Ideally we will be going with an overlapping-tarp solution because sewing a custom cover for a 32' dome may be more work than we are prepared to do for the first year. Construction of the struts took enough time and $$ (we don't have a huge crew) that we might not be able to afford a fancy covering for the first year. Also, the first use of this dome will be at Burning Flipside in Austin, and not the playa, so we didn't have all the same concerns when considering the initial covering. A 35' cargo parachute was cheap and easily available - we may use it in conjunction with tarps to keep the whole dome covered, but only parts of it rainproof. We'll see what works, but would love to hear what worked for everyone else.

PVC pipes were not considered for this dome for the reasons outlined above - It is not strong enough, is not heat/sun resistant, does not last as long, etc. We want something that will last for at least a few years so budget was not a huge concern. Also I've seen many pictures of collapsed/destroyed PVC domes at Burning Man, and we decided early that was not for us. :) We first built an optimal 2-frequency dome with 3/4 EMT to test the construction and assembly process and make sure everything went well before we started on the big one. The measuring/cutting/smashing/drilling is all done and was pretty easy. All that's left is to smooth the ends, then bend and paint the ~250 struts. I am also making a color-coded scale model 4v dome to help with the assembly in the field.

The top-down building we figured would be the fastest, and that was our big concern this time. This event is only 5 days and our crew is limited, so we don't want to spend an entire day building just this one camp structure if possible. The rental of the lifting gear does cost money which we don't necessarily want to spend, but ultimately we decided on speed and safety, at least for this event. We felt that building it from the bottom up would be possible, but would get more tricky and time consuming as we need to be on ladders or scaffholding to do the top part. We also don't necessarily have 15 people to lift up the dome while we add the next layer of struts, but it's good to know it can be done with enough gorilla power. We are open to other ideas and that's why I asked the group here :)

Has anyone tried to assemble a conduit dome like this in subassemblies? I figured it would be unwieldy to try to lift 20 pound strut assemblies up and bolt them to the existing structure. If someone has done this before and had success, I'd love to hear about it, but we hadn't really considered it. Bottom-up assembly is easy for the 2v dome because it only requires a stepladder for the 5 top/center struts.

Thanks hoco for having your page up - We read all the information we could find on the web and yours was one of the ones we used for background info. I agree with most of your primary concerns about parachutes but it was the easiest and cheapest thing to start with. We used Earl's 'Recharge dome' page (dome.zillabit.com/rechargedome.html) as the basis for our construction since it's basically the same dome and they had already done all the math :) This is where we got the idea to rent the 18ft hoist and it seemed like a great idea for a minimal cost.

Thanks again for the replies, I'm glad to see there are people active here. I will be sure to post some pics when we have built the thing.