making a football out of paper

Okay, so it is not technically a sphere but it is close! The shape in question is a truncatedicosahedron, the same shape as the Carbon 60 molecule and the old style soccer ball. I used this shape in the paper globe model but I've made a few changes here. The globe model came in two halves and was tricky to glue together. This model is a solution I've come up with to much easier to assemble.  

If you are a member you can download the parts file for free. Print out the parts onto thin card (230 micron / 230 gsm) Score along all the dotted lines as accurately as possible then carefully cut out the two parts.  

Exercise the crease lines then glue the halves together as shown above. Notice that there is a row of hexagon and pentagon tabs right round the edge of the halves. Fold these downwards as shown in the picture.

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Match the two halves together by aligning one of the pentagon tabs (the five sides shape) with one of the pentagon faces. Once you have them aligned, interlock all the tabs to link the two halves together.

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Work round the shape adding glue under each of the tabs and lining then up accurately with the faces until all the tabs are glued down.

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And that s your completed sphere! Much easier to put together than the paper globe!

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To complete your joy with the project I've added this coloured patterned version. Enjoy!   

Making a Sphere

Making a Sphere

Thu 16th Jan 2014

Paper is intrinsically flat. Not suited for making spheres. To make curves takes geometry. There are a few ways of approximating a sphere from paper including making multi-faceted shapes or, as in this case, slicing up the surface and rebuilding it in strips.

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I've decided to split the sphere into twenty degree slices from top to bottom. Vertically I'm using ten strips.

Each horizontal slice is effectively a circle. I can work out the radius of each of the circles using the sine of the angle. For example, the top slice is twenty degrees down, sin 20 ° is 0.342, multiplied by the radius of the sphere, 50mm, gives a radius for that slice of 17mm

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Looking down from the top to see the ten segments making up the sphere. With a bit more geometry I've worked out the multiplier to calculate the segment width at each slice. Turns out it is 0.62.

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So for example at the 40 ° level the radius of the slice is 32mm. Multiply that by 0.62 to get a slice width of 20mm. Yay maths!

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Having worked out the widths of the segment at each level it is simply a case of transfering the numbers to Illustator, creating a slice then making nine more copies. The addition of a top and bottom disk completes the parts

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Once everything is printed out, I cut the bits out and started gluing them together.The downside of side a fine grained globe model like this is that there are a lot of tabs to glue, ninety if my maths hasn't let me down.

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Still, I think it is worth the effort.

how to make paper Papier Mâché Spheres Kids Make: Kids Make:

 Papier Mâché Spheres

 

Kids Make:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p5Nh5IYki8


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUkbcSyinIo

wallace neff

Episode 89: Bubble Houses

By 99PI on September 17, 2013

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If you were a movie star in the market for a mansion in 1930s Los Angeles, there was a good chance you might call on Wallace Neff.

Neff wasn’t just an architect–he was a starchitect. One of his most famous projects was the renovation of Pickfair, the estate owned by the iconic silent film actress Mary Pickford, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks. When the couple moved into Pickfar, the house sat on a nameless street in an empty neighborhood called Beverly Hills. If you were lucky enough to be invited to dinner at Pickfair you might find yourself seated next to Babe Ruth, the King of Spain or Albert Einstein. Life magazine called Pickfair “only slightly less important than the white house, and much more fun.” Neff designed estates for Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Groucho Marx. His Libby Ranch is now owned by Reese Witherspoon.

But at the end of his life, Wallace Neff lived in a 1,000 square foot concrete bubble. And Neff believed that this simple dome was his greatest architectural achievements.

(Wallace Neff at an airform construction site. Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Near the end of World War II, architects were anticipating the post-war housing shortage. Neff wanted to create a solution that would not only meet this demand, but address the need for housing worldwide.

The idea came to Neff one morning when he was shaving. He looked down and noticed a soap bubble that had formed on the sink. He reached out and touched it. The bubble held firm against his fingertip. That was the moment the idea struck him. He could build with air.  He could make bubble.

And Neff wanted to build them by the thousands.

(One of Neff’s patent drawings for a double-bubble house. Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Neff never intended to make money from the bubble houses. Having already made his fortune as an architect for the rich and famous (and his grandfather was Andrew McNally, founder of Rand McNally publishing), Neff say these bubble houses as a way of fulfilling a social responsibility. He wanted to engineer a new way to provide low-cost housing.

For the record, dome-shaped living structures was not a new idea. The indigenous Acjachemon of Southern California had wickiups, the Ojibwe had wigwams, and the Inuit had (and still have) igloos.  And even during Neff’s lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was creating his own circular solution to the housing shortage: The Geodesic Dome. (See Episode #64). But Neff’s design was something completely different.

The process was called “airform.” First, a big slab of concrete was poured in the shape of a giant coin.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Next, they inflated a giant balloon in the shape of a grapefruit, with the flat side down. This balloon was tied down to the foundation using steel hooks.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

After the balloon was inflated it was coated in a fine powder. And then it was cover with a magical substance called gunite–the product of water and dry cement mix combined at a high pressure and shot out of a gun.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Two men with a balloon and a gunite machine could turn a bare patch of soil into a bubble house in less than 48 hours. And after the gunite dried the balloon was deflated and pulled out through the front door so it could be used again on the next house.

When the gunite dried it was more than twice as strong as regular concrete. Wallace Neff was so confident in his design that he would invite people to bash the walls of the bubble  with the back side of an axe. The axe would just bounce off.

(Courtesy of Steve Roden and Jeffrey Head.)

(Courtesy of Steve Roden and Jeffrey Head.)

In October of 1941, Neff began construction on a community of twelve bubble houses in Falls Church, Virginia. The project was paid for by the federal government, and was used to house government workers.  The neighborhood would eventually take on the nickname Igloo Village.

(Credit: Wallace Neff. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Life in a bubble house could be problematic. Their round rooms were difficult to furnish, and the concave walls were not conducive to hanging pictures.

(Credit: Huntington Library, Maynard Parker Collection.)

(Courtesy of Steve Roden and Jeffrey Head.)

Igloo Village was in the middle of the woods,  cut off from the rest of the town. And because it was so damp, mold would appear inside the house. And to make matters worse, kids from neighboring towns would drive into their community to ogle these weird buildings. There were no streetlights in Igloo Village, which served to make the headlights of the intruding cars all the more ominous and penetrating.

Wallace Neff was able to land a few more clients for his bubble houses. The Southwest Cotton Company hired him to build a desert colony of bubble houses in Litchfield Park, Arizona. Loyola University in Los Angeles contracted Neff to build a bubble house dormitory. And in 1944, the Pacific Linen Supply Company commissioned a bubble structure 100 feet in diameter and 32 feet high–the largest ever built.

Eventually everyone moved out of their bubbles. With the exception of a bubble in Pasadena that Neff himself lived in, every one of Neff’s bubbles in the United States have been demolished.

But if there was one good thing about the bubble houses, it’s that they are incredibly cheap and easy to build–qualities attractive to much of the developing world. There have been, or still are, bubble houses in Pakistan, Egypt, Liberia, India, Jordan, Turkey, Kuwait, South Africa, The Virgin Islands, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Brazil.

The biggest collection of bubble houses–a community of 1,200–was built in Dakar, Senegal.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

(Credit: Wallace Neff. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Many of these bubbles are still around today.

(Credit: Candice Felt. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Wallace Neff wanted a building solution to house the masses. So in a sense, Neff actually got what he wanted.

(Credit: Candice Felt. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Los Angeles-based reporter David Weinberg spoke with historian Jeffrey Head, author of No Nails, No Lumber: The Bubble Houses of Wallace Neff.  David also spoke with Kathy Miles, who grew up in Igloo Village; Steve Roden, an artist and current resident of the last remaining bubble house in the US; and architect Stefanos Polyzoides, who has his practice in a classic Spanish/Mediterranean-style Wallace Neff building. (Polyzoides personally hates the bubble houses.)

We also hear from Dakar-based producer Juliana Friend, who was nice enough to go check on the bubbles over there.

A different version of this story originally aired on KCRW as part of theirIndependent Producer Project.

David is also the brains behind Random Tape, an audio experiment in, well, random tape.

Music: “Memory Pictures”- Patten, “La Seine”- Hauschka, “Sunlight (Sequence 1 & 2)”- OK Ikumi, “Kamogawa”- Hauschka, “Until Then”- Orcas, “Happiness”- Hauschka, “Memory Pictures”- Patten, “Bubbles in the Forest”- Lullatone, “Scrambled (Forest World Remix)”- OK Ikumi

another dome company

https://www.dometechnology.com/

A Foam Dome Home

The foam dome from Tecton Corp was a novel home design that held its heat.

By the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors
May/June 1980

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LEFT: Foam dome owners are marked by enthusiasm for the shape. RIGHT: Because no interior walls are load-bearing, owners may place partitions to suit their own preferences.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF AND TECTON CORP

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Nudged forward by the energy crisis of the 70's (which shows no signs of abating during the 80's), the U.S. construction industry has made some well-meaning — but too frequently haphazard — attempts at building energy-efficient housing. In fact, most new structures tend to be far better insulated than their ten-year-old counterparts, and the weather-stripping business has never been healthier. Also, some of the more progressive contractors have actually begun to orient buildings in such a way that they can catch the sun's heat . . . and it's not at all rare, these days, to see more glass on the south side of a house than on its northern exposure.

However, except for the efforts of a handful of rebellious designers — one of whom has developed a foam dome — the basic configuration of the U.S. home remains unchanged: rectangular . . . with wooden stud construction, some sort of porous siding packed with insulation, and a peaked roof on top. Far too few architects seem willing to accept the inherent faults in such "standard" housing. Let's face it: Attempting to make a conventional structure truly energy-efficient can often be akin to building a dam which is weak by design . . . and then patching it where it leaks.

Heat Loss

Obviously, the root of the problem has been that — until recently — the economics of energy has never forced us to look at our buildings from the point of view of conservation . . . even though the basic guidelines for making the best use of energy have been available to heat engineers for decades. For instance, the heat loss of any structure can be described by the relationship of five factors: surface area, insulation, storage, leakage (called infiltration), and the difference between inside and outside temperatures. Examples of buildings that combat heat loss through each of the five areas have been printed in this magazine since its birth . . . and some of the approaches — such as earth-sheltering — have managed to combine a number of energy-saving methods in a single structure.

But what would happen if an architect were to look at all five of the heat loss factors beforedesigning a building? The form developed as a result of such an analysis definitely wouldn't be the all-American box. For one thing, it's difficult to conceive (within the range of practical construction methods) of a shape that has more surface area per unit of floor space than does a cube. And our ideal heat-holding structure certainly wouldn't be built from any material that requires the addition of both insulation and sealing to be energy-efficient.

Area = 4 π r²

When California-based designer Lloyd Turner decided to take the heat-loss equation to his drafting board, the result was a totally new kind of structure — formed by an innovative blending of known technologies — that just may end up revolutionizing the housing industry.

First of all, to an architect who's attempting to minimize heat-robbing wall and roof area, a rounded structure is nearly irresistible. By using a portion of a sphere (or a paraboloid or an ellipsoid), the surface area for a given floor space can be reduced by as much as 40% from that of a cube. Thus the economy of the dome shape is undeniable ... and — from the standpoint of comfort — a circular room will not have the chilly corners that are frequently found in angular abodes.

A Foam Dome Home

The foam dome from Tecton Corp was a novel home design that held its heat.

By the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors
May/June 1980

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R-34 Insulation

Of course, many people already know about the basic benefits of dome-type construction. But Mr. Turner's buildings have advantages beyond those of the familiar geodesics. Lloyd felt that the most economical and efficient way to thoroughly insulate a house would be to build the walls themselves from insulation. That concept led him to look into the sprayed foam and concrete techniques which were just being developed at the time. And, over the last ten years, a spray system has been developed which can produce self-supporting domes.

Tecton Corporation — a Colorado-based company that builds according to the "Turner method" and licenses other contractors — uses a four-inch layer of polyurethane (with an effective R-value of 34) as the exterior covering, and then applies two inches of metal-reinforced concrete as the interior wall.

While placing a building's insulation on the outside may sound a bit strange at first, it makes perfect sense on closer examination. Because the concrete mass is in contact with the heated air space of the structure's interior, it absorbs and holds the home's warmth. . . and the exterior polyurethane insulation prevents the thermal mass from releasing its stored BTU outdoors.

Up, Up, and Away

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the foam dome concept is the elegant simplicity of this form of construction. First a slab or perimeter foundation is poured, and then a licensed Tecton crew attaches a clamping ring to the base. The clamp holds down a nylon bag (similar to a hot air balloon), which is inflated by a large compressor, and the materials are then sprayed directly onto the inner surface of the air-filled form. Once the foam and concrete have set, the balloon is removed (it can be reused as many as four times), and the dome's exterior is painted with a protective plastic coating.

From start to finish, the erection of the shell takes only two weeks. Thus the interior finishing can proceed under shelter and in relative comfort . . . even during harsh winter months in northern climates. And because the dome shape distributes loads laterally — resulting in incredibly high compressional strength — there is no need for any interior load-bearing walls. Actually, the internal partitions in such a house could be movable . . . to allow for redesigning the floor plan at the owner's whim. (Another advantage of the high load capabilities of the domes is that the buildings are strong enough to be placed underground.)

50% Energy Savings

One Colorado dome — which MOTHER EARTH NEWS visited in February of this year — has been occupied for almost three years now . . . and the residents find that their electrical bills are about half those of their neighbors who live in conventional homes with equivalent floor space. Furthermore, the Tecton-house dwellers claim that the majority of their power consumption goes to the dehumidifier which they've found to be necessary in the incredibly airtight structure. (In fact, the building is so tightly sealed that turning on the exhaust fan on its electric range produces enough depression to cause one's ears to pop!)

Another Tecton dome (this one's located out on the plains of Nebraska) is entirely heated by the solar gain from its south-facing windows . . . with occasional help from a backup woodstove. Again, a combination of the home's insulative and storage capability—along with its minimal surface area and complete control of infiltration—keeps the heat demands of the structure low.

A Foam Dome Home

The foam dome from Tecton Corp was a novel home design that held its heat.

By the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors
May/June 1980

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Comparable Costs

Though the materials cost for a Tecton-type dome is relatively high, the rapid rate of construction keeps labor expenses low . . . resulting in an average square-footage figure of just $32. The folks at Tecton look forward to a time when they can establish a wide network of licensed contractors who will build enough domes to bring the costs down even further.

Back in Tecton's early days, it was assumed that there would be little demand for individual dome residences. In fact, the company's earliest projects were almost exclusively large commercial structures. One example—the Holly Sugar Warehouse in Delta, Colorado—is 120 feet in diameter. But in cooperation with Stratidome, the Tecton-licensed builder in Boulder, Colorado (whose president, Bill Milburn, does Tecton's architectural and engineering work and is himself deeply committed to the polyurethane and concrete dome concept), eight residence domes have now been constructed and many more are in the planning stages.

Perbaps it came as a surprise to the firm that the public would so easily accept the rather unconventional appearance of a Tecton dome (Tecton's John Smith and Mert Hall cringe at the often applied "flying saucer" comparison), but the company's sprayed-foam domes seem to be moving out of the range of novelty and into the class of accepted housing design. The reasons are simple: Such dwellings are efficient, and they're delightful to live in. Though the houses appear small from outside, they're spacious inside . . . and the acoustics of the rounded structures have to be heard to be believed. It isn't surprising that the best salespersons for Tecton dome homes are the families now living comfortably inside them.