Next Steps: Painting and Gluing

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Once we finished cutting out our triangles, we started painting them. We brushed on acrylic paint instead of using spray paint, as it seemed logistically easier. Finding a place on campus to spray paint 75 triangles and finding enough time when it wasn't windy would have been a pain. It took much less time to paint than cut, so we were done with all the triangles within 2 weeks.



After we had enough triangles painted, we started gluing them together into panels. The geodesic dome pattern we used has a single pentagon at the top, then a ring of 5 hexagons, then a ring of 5 pentagons, then a ring of 5 half hexagons (to make a flat bottom). This makes for a total of 11 panels plus 5 half panels. We used wood glue for this step. This turned out to be a good choice, as the wood glue starts setting up pretty quickly, so once we got the triangles properly positioned they didn't slip around too much. We did use binder clips on the glued edges to hold them together as they dried, just in case.


We just completed this step this week.

Last week we did a trial run with the panels we had finished, just to get an idea of how well the panels match and what it'll look like when it's all done. We discovered that the panels match very well and that it's going to look great, but the binder clips which we used to attach the panels to one another are not going to hold.


While we could glue the large panels together, we really wanted this thing to be modular. Being able to store the panels in a stack would make it easier to reuse the geodesic dome in future years. Because once you've got a giant cardboard geodesic dome, you might as well use it every year, right? I ordered some cardboard screws from Makedo and in our tests those seem to hold up much better. Once we have the touch-up painting of the panels done, we'll try assembling all the panels with those screws.

That may be it on the cardboard front for awhile; we still need to get the features of the Death Star on there somehow (we're thinking duct tape for the lighter colored trenches), but we'll want to wait until September to do that as we'd need the thing to be assembled for at least a week while we decorate it. There's still plenty of work to do on the electronics front, however, so we won't be idle until then!

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