Dome works

The weekend project work is suffering due to outings and community meetings. My focus at present is on the dome greenhouse. On encouragement from my brother we even experimented with dimensions in sketchup. This seemed to indicate the measurements on the web site acidome.ru for a 3v dome with all struts cut to compound angles were pretty good. So I set up this little gauntlet of saws to feed material through. Neither can cut a 2x4 standing on it's side, so the older ryobi unit in the foreground is set up to cut shallow compound angles on the end of struts to form the dome with the timber on it's side. The hitachi sliding chop saw at the back has a lot better angle adjustment, so that is on the same run of fence to cut pieces to length and to cut either a 10degree or 12 degree angle on the ends.
I didn't get as far as I hoped today, but have cut sufficient of two types of strut to form two pentagons and a hexagon. That should tell me whether I am way off the Mark or not. There are four types of angles to cut and three types of strut not including variations to flatten out the base. Two of the strut types also have different angles at either end, so lots of chances to do the wrong thing.



The first triangle of one pentagon with a strap clamp on to assess the joint cuts. The little blocks on the table are cut to the various end angles to facilitate alignment of the radial arm saw blade. They are also marked with the type of strut and the angle to try and eliminate confusion. It looked pretty good, so I may be able to screw one of the pentagons together tomorrow.