| BACKGROUND
My work on this design began in 1978. I chose to start from scratch without first checking as to how the great innovative Buckminister Fuller arrived at his solutions (that is to say, I conducted no prior research).
My goal from the start was to come up with a geodesic dome that was simple to design and build. The more complex structures designed by Mr. Fuller more often than not require a good deal of math and CAD work.
After a few months of ‘hands-on’ thinking, I managed to arrive at my first basic design whereby the exact same triangular-shaped element need be repeated no more than 60 times to form a geodesic dome. To make sure that I had come upon a different, and perhaps even unique, solution to the problem, I then wrote to Mr. Fuller explaining my work. He expressed interest in my work and was kind enough to send me all his patent numbers at the time. In checking through all of the registered patents thereby made known to me, I have failed to find any that had, so to speak, have ‘approached the problem from my direction.’
For more than 20 years, since that time, I have worked, in my spare time, upon making improvements—both structurally and aesthetically. This primarily involved working out the necessary geometry to add proper slopes to my initially rather flat triangles, i.e. to break the surface up into more accentuated facets. Although this meant adding a bit of complexity (in that now 30 left-hand and 30 right-hand ‘triangles’ need to be made), there was a substantial gain in synergistic strength not to mention appearance.
The next step is to build a reasonably large scale model to confirm that all the angles in my geometric tables actually work out. Since only two forms have to be built to manufacture the broken triangles as shown above, there is a minimum of work involved—and certainly no CAD/CAM.
For further details about angle tables etc., send me a message: eme@skatemate.com
Sunday, January 26, 2003. | 
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