Geodesic Dome Struts: Drilling
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| Cutting | Flattening | Drilling | Bending |
Drilling struts is simple: you cut your lengths, you flatten the ends and you’re ready to drill.
IMPORTANT: to bolt struts together, you must make your struts longer than what is given by the calculator. Why? because on paper, the meeting points or vertices are at the end of a strut. That would not be a problem if you could glue the struts together, but that is impossible with metal conduit.
The solution is to make the struts longer in order to drill a hole into them. The drilled holes become the new vertex point.
Practical example
If you add 1.5 inch to each end, your final strut length will be 2 X 1.5 – 3 inches longer. So whatever the calculator displays, you need to add 3 inches to every single strut.
When it comes time to drill the holes, you deduct 1.5 inch from the tip, and this will be the center of your bolt hole. So in effect the distance between hole centers will be the same as your calculated lengths, with the advantage that you can now attach the struts together.
