Project: Heavy Water

[Durrthock]

lol @ daughterboards

[The boy 4rm oz]

A really interesting design. +sub

[halcyonforever]

minor update: first attempt at working with the wire-mesh for the hyperbolic towers. It's not as stiff as I thought it would be and has alot more flexibility than I had planned. I may have to look into some re-inforced beams for the internal structure.

[Fuganater]

You could use rods to make your shape of the towers. And maybe bend the rods into circles for added support.

/sub cuz it looks promising

[halcyonforever]

Yeah I bought all the steel rods that Home Depot had, cut them in half and have started bending them to form internal struts. The bending is a @!%^ because it is so hard to bend a large radius curve with a tool designed to do small radius sharp turns. It's working pretty well but my hands are killing me from it. Then those vertical rods will be connected to a circular piece to provide the internal structure, which will then be covered in the mesh and then probably plastered.

[Cobra]

find a 55 gallon drum to use as a jig.
bring a pair of vise grips and a handful of the steel rods to the drum.
clamp one end of the rod to the lip at the top of the drum and pull the other around it till you get the curve you want.
then cut to size later
saves a tn on hand aches and will work with most any solid container that has a lip you can clamp to.
be good to see this thing take shape.
good job so far

[halcyonforever]

Quick update: I don't have pictures off of my camera yet.

I have 8 steel rods bent to roughly the right shape, enough to hold things in place. The curve is close enough, I will have to work with some extra plaster/bondo to get the outer shape correct.

I have constructed the base for the first tower out of poplar. I have found that the tower will be narrower than I had origionally imagined. It will start at 10 inch diameter at the base, narrow to about 6 inches before tapering out to about 8 inches.

I also have the first cuts done on the window cutout. Apparently the case is steel, so it is burning through my heavy duty cutoff blades.

[halcyonforever]

So I have realized that I am going all about the tower structure wrong, and took the hard route with bending the poles for vertical supports. I did some reasearch on how the actual towers are built and alot of trigonometry and have developed a far more effecient method.

I am still playing in sketchup to get the dimensions. But here is the current build plan.

[halcyonforever]

Ok, so I have finished messing with Sketchup for this section. The towers will be 12 inches tall and be built with 16 x 16'' poles set up like this.

I pickeded up the first set of rods today.

I realized this sketch is kind of mis-leading. This is just for my measurements and design the central cylinder is to let me see what the most narrow part of the tower would be to build around that, the outer struts will be covered with the mesh from the above photos then plastered.

[Airbozo]

lol @ daughterboards

Hehe What do you think they would call them, sonboards?

Nice design halcyon!

I love some of the server systems for all the odd parts inside. I should see if I can take my camera into the computer history museum, up the street... A lesson in add-ons....