We’re stuck at home and all wanted a project, how about a Hubs Dome Project, luckily I had been bought a hubs dome kit for my last birthday.
The kit of hub parts comes in a densely packed beautifully printed cardboard box.
This is a lovely present for any technical person and great with Corona virus sweeping across the world. A good project for those in isolation as I can work in my garden and workshop, keeping my mind busy.
Sturdy Canvas bag containing all of the parts with a chunky zip across the top.
This is a really cool printed canvas bag that I’m sure will find a new application once this has been all assembled.
All of the parts are collected in plastic bags. The hub plastic parts themselves are 5 and 6 nodes.
Now all we need to do is think what it is that we want to make.
The project was to make a small greenhouse, a dome that would sit on posts and be covered in plastic.
The dome was to be 1.3m in diameter as this would nicely fit on a 3×3 slabbed area we have in the garden.
The hubs calculator showed that we needed 30 off short sticks 267mm long and 35 off long sticks 314mm long.
A quick spreadsheet showed me that I could get these all out of two gravel boards: 21mm x 150mm x 1830mm
The great thing about these boards is that they are pressure treated already and so have a good level of resisted to the weather.
I started by cutting 5 short boards that were each 267mm long.
Using the frame saw I could ensure that the boards were cut square, this is really important.
3 of the short boards were cut from one board and 2 from the other. This then gave me enough material to cut 3 long boards from the remainder of one and 3 long boards from the other.
Next was to cut the boards lengthwise 21mm wide. These were cut using my Record Power BS250 bandsaw.
I use a dust extractor on the bandsaw and this is important as this softwood can irritate some people.
Take your time cutting these on the bandsaw as the wood is knotty. Knots can drive the saw off line.
Soon I had lots of boards and some sticks cut to what was now 21mm square.
I sanded all of the sticks using my homemade disc sander, once again using an extractor.
using a sanding disc to trim all of the sticks sanding all of the corners all edges rounded and smoothed a pile of long and a pile of short sticks
Rapidly I had a pile of long and short sticks all sanded, smooth and with rounded corners.
These are all pile up with lots of air around them to dry out. The original gravel boards had been kept outside and were damp after cutting.
You have to pre-drill each end of the stick with a 2.5mm drill to a depth of 35mm.
I’m using the chuck on the drill as the stop with the drill protruding 35mm.
The next step is to paint all of the wooden sticks with a garden treatment and then assemble the dome.