The Egg

Above is an image of my experimental half sized plypod known locally as the Egg.

I made this structure from observing photographs of other plydomes and really without any knowledge of how to go about the project.

In fact I made this on a dare from my wife Aubrey, who insisted that I could not build the basic structure in a day. In fact it took 10 hours to make the plywood sphere.

Each panel is a two foot by four foot sheet of 1/4 inch plywood. So I got four panels from a standard 4x8 foot sheet.

Not knowing the proper angles and being to lazy to do the math I simply drilled a bolt hole in each corner and rotated the panels into place. Thus to some extent they aligned themselves. This would have been really neat but without the aligned bolts the sphere is not a sphere and is rather an angular quasi-sphere.

As you can see there is still some work to be done on the windows and other openings - but as a test model it has proved invaluable.

We also had a great beer party inside and the Egg is quite capable of holding up to seven adults in some spacious comfort - not bad for a spheroid less than nine feet in diameter.

Right now the Egg is used as storage but it would make a great bathroom, walk-in closet, or office attached to the larger plypod - someone once observed that domes make lousy houses but great rooms.

I believe that this observation may be quite right. But I observe that I live in rooms not in a house, so my approach is to make dome rooms not dome houses and attach the rooms to each other.