Back to the drawing board...

The team today were working on another redesign! After a consultation with the tutors some issues were raised, the structure of the roof seemed to be the most difficult thing to work out. There was much debate between Nathan and Jerry, to everyone's amusement. Another serious issue was the scale of the design, with a maximum height of 4.5m and a roof spanning 6m - the whole project had to be scaled down. This meant redesigning, redrawing, remeasuring and holding off on finalising the order with the timber merchants, sorry Erin!

James designated people to work on the roof and wall construction alongside Alex Pearson to come to a conclusion about the foundations and roof structure. The design of the roof has changed due to the fact that the angles don't fit snugly to ensure a flat roof that sits flush against the supporting walls. Eimear, our saviour,  therefore suggested a butterfly roof to solve this problem which meant more structure to get our teeth into. Nathan worked like crazy on the sketchup model and Stuart made new models of the roof whilst Mark, Mike and Joe built a new mock-up of one triangular frame at scale 1:1 which we had lots of fun with testing the cladding strength by jumping on it.

Our saving grace

The roof takes the shape of a folding rhombus and will be structured using a bow-string truss along the spine with struts coming off to support the cladding. Its all getting very exciting, everyone is eager to get stuck in and started with the construction.

The roof at the moment.....