[Baptiste Marx] shares his take on designing emergency structures using PVC pipe in a way that requires an absolute minimum of added parts. CINTRE (French, English coverage article here) is his collection of joint designs, with examples of how they can be worked into a variety of structures.
PVC pipe is inexpensive, widely available, and can often be salvaged in useful quantities even in disaster areas because of its wide use in plumbing and as conduits in construction. It can be cut with simple tools, and once softened with heat, it can be re-formed easily.
What is really clever about [Baptiste]’s designs is that there is little need for external fasteners or hardware. Cable ties are all that’s required to provide the structural element of many things. Two sawhorse-like assemblies, combined with a flat surface, make up a table, for example.
Soda bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are also common salvage and can be used as surprisingly sturdy heat-shrink and even turned into twine or rope; perhaps that could be an option if one doesn’t even have access to cable ties.
I suppose you have to choose your zip ties carefully, since some get brittle and break after a while.
There are metal strap ties, possibly could even use wire.
I don’t know about long term durability, but if you stretch vhs tape long enough, it suddenly changes from a ribbon to a thread and it resists further dtretching, it’s extremely strong, and as you have to stretch it to i think about 7 time it’s length a 120 foot tape gives a LOT of binding material.
But you’ll have to rob a museum to get vhs tape. 😀
These are designs for Emergency structures. They need to last weeks not years.
During an emergency I’d rather smoke a joint to keep me calm.
Healthier than PVC fumes, too.
Ditto 😊
I never understood how rasta anxiety and paranoia cigarettes did that for people. Doesn’t work the same way for me I guess
PROTIP: grow your own weed, not that dealer crap sprinkled with spice and other synths.
There’s some evidence of neurodivergency on some of the psychoactive drugs. Cannabis can cause anxiety, some people don’t find hallucinogens hallucinogenic, yada yada
Pot always causes anxiety until tolerance.
It’s called ‘getting paranoid’…also ‘munchies’.
Some people find the ‘paranoid’ part so bad they never get past it.
Poor bastards.
It’s like ecstasy, apparently makes intolerable music tolerable.
Which is enough reason to avoid it.
CIA showed just how suggestable acid makes you.
Do Acid with deadheads and you might wake up liking endless ‘diddle, doodle, deedle, diddle, do’ (band is lost, forgot which ‘song’ they’re playing), forget how to mosh.
I’ve seen it happen, did involve deadhead P.
People have been doing this with bamboo since forever. You can bend it with heat, and lash poles together with cord made from whatever appropriate fiber you have handy in your location.
People have been doing this with all kinds of materials forever.
I don’t see how it being made of PVC pipe is much of a benefit here. If you can find enough long enough pieces it may be practical but to get long pieces you would likely have to go and pull it out of intact buildings, destroyed buildings are probably pretty unlikely to have long straight sections of PVC pipe. Also the amount of pipe needed almost makes it impractical, to build a reasonable shelter like shown you would need quite a lot of pipe.
As long as that stuff stay out of sunlight, it’ll be fine. If not, those cable ties will eventually break.
I would imagine if one is in the situations where uc exposure to the zip ties would be a problem then more permanent solutions would be in the works
Didn’t read article, so perhaps I am missing something. Adding complexity to a problem that would seem to be already solved. PVC piping joints are available in in many angular combinations and vertex counts.
The idea is that you can make fancy looking joints from just PVC pipe without having to go to the hardware store to find those fittings.
For the point of disaster area relief, this method is just a more time consuming version of lashing together lengths of PVC pipe or any other sticks with rope or wire. The point is the design, not the utility – all design just needs an excuse for some reason.
You still have to go to the hardware store for the pipes and the ty-raps?
The idea is that you’d somehow have the PVC pipe there already. Don’t ask how or why.
Plumbing and electrical use PVC. In case of disaster the thought is there would be plenty of PVC available from destroyed buildings
Oh dear, it’s that core77 site again. That thing eats up ram – I’ve never been able to load it up without crashing the browser.
Made a snapshot with archive.is, this seems to make it readable…
https://archive.is/1FSN8
Apparently the core77 link entirely crashes Firefox if left open.
Chromium/webkit browsers seem unaffected.
It causes a very rapid memory leak that eats up tens of gigabytes in just couple minutes.
Bes
Shh!! don’t tell them. Better that we complain here, quietly amongst ourselves :)
I would, but I’m unable to open the site to check their contact information.
Then again, I don’t care that much.
How could they possibly not know?
They don’t care, why should anybody else.
People are lazy so I guess nobody told them there’s a problem.
They didn’t do any testing. Many such sites aren’t done by people who understand web design, they just dump 300 MB raw image files straight off of Photoshop and some copy/pasted javascript to make it work.
If it looks and works locally on their macbook pro, it’s ready for publishing.
Works on my machine.
Shelter? Cute. I don’t see any reference to wind loading capacity/snow roof load etc. What I do see is the rediscovery that PVC pipe can be bent with a bit of heat, layered in with artist’s statements and a student project.
“I base my practice on contextualized object design,” he writes. “Sensitive to an aesthetic resulting from materials and manufacturing processes, I favor an experimental and reflective approach, where research occupies a central place. Between sensitive and technical creations, I seek to develop a multidisciplinary and conscious design.”*
” CINTRE responds to this emergency by offering a system that allows shelters to be built quickly while guaranteeing long-term safety and dignity.”
PVC tubing/tarp portable garages (which this is copied from) can be gotten through the usual sources and will likely be more sturdy. Long-term safety is absolutely not going to happen with this. Likely dignity will go out in the wind and rain as well.
(*If you want preposterous artist statements you can make your own with https://www.artybollocks.com/)
Thanks for the artybollocks link!
“..contextualized object design.” Wow. It’s amazing how quickly I can lose interest. I know there is more, and maybe some of it even worse, but I don’t even need to know.
Cute ill remember this when the shit hits the fan never mind the thousands of feet of wire at hand one could use to lash shit to other shit, we will just scamper down to harbor freight and buy a few dozen bags of zip ties
Surely you already have a few dozen bags of zip ties if you’re talking about concepts like sthf.
It’s easy to talk smack about this as if it’s intended to be permanent and sensible (it’s not, it’s more akin to an art project) but experimenting like this is actually a very good design exercise.
Yep. Some of the joints make sense, like flattening the tube and wrapping it around into a T-joint. That’s harder to do neatly by other means.
Noodling around with PVC pipes doesn’t need to be about excuses like disaster relief though. For the engineering minded, just coming up with novel ways to join pieces together is enough. That is the value of the exercise.
Often, especially in companies and universities you need to justify what you are doing and the popular options for that are to just say it is for search and rescue or disaster relief and it will be much more likely to get approved or funded.
Like medical researchers claiming loads of things may be potential cancer drugs with only a very loose connection just to get more funding.
It’s sad that we have gotten to this stage but you have to do what you have to do. Engineering just for the sake of coming up with something new and interesting is not much of a thing anymore, everything needs potential applications and the more it is to do with helping people the better.
It’s all about the annealing.
Melted and folded like this, then strained, the PVC will crack in days, maximum.
Emergency facilities sometimes have to stand more then days.
Besides this is a GD artist attempting engineering…or gaming grant system like Conor says.
It’s not like there haven’t been many emergency shelters constructed over the centuries.
What we need is an artist to do a clean sheet design / sarc.
ugh
i know a guy. He’s very old now. He’s lived on the same land for about 50 years. To get to his main house, you have to walk by his first house, a little cabin that collapsed because of no cross-bracing. And then you walk by a dog kennel that collapsed because of no cross-bracing. Beside his barn, he put a giant plastic rain barrel to collect the runoff from the barn’s roof, which is raised up on stilts so it has enough head to reach his garden. The stilts are all wocker-jawed because of a complete lack of cross-bracing.
One day i’m there helping him build a new platform under the existing platform for that rain barrel, and he doesn’t want to use cross-bracing for that either! In his mind, he would just use bigger pieces of lumber and it wouldn’t need cross-bracing. We almost came to blows.
Since scientists are working on this, they could calculate the strength of the structure. I would like to know how much weight such a table or chair can hold. Or whether a tent covered with plastic sheeting rather than fabric can withstand winds of, say, x km/h.
Why would you want a scientist to do engineer work?
Wouldn’t you prefer an answer?
Strength will depend non-linearly on the exact temperature the pipe was melted to and how much internal strain is frozen into each joint as it cooled.
I’d expect the distribution to be bad enough that the life of a heat bent PVC structure would largely be determined by the single worst bend in it (insert B. Clinton Joke here).
Failure rate a function of # of parts.
First you have to ask, what kind of PVC pipe do you have? Water pipe, electrical conduit? Other? What impact resistance, what plasticizers? What temperature rating?
PVC goes brittle in the cold, unless specifically formulated to remain soft, so the tent may fall to pieces when the weather goes below +10 degrees C. But if it doesn’t, the material might be too soft to handle +30 degrees C weather and it could bend out of shape under load. It also doesn’t do very well against UV light, so exposure to the sun would quickly degrade it.
In other words, PVC is a rather poor material for structural purposes when exposed to the elements.
I had proposed a scalable pitcher pump for moving water that was mostly all PVC and a few 3D printed parts that would go well with something like this.
Bending the pipe like that, wrapping it over an other pipe is simple but it’s also about the weakest way to do it. If you can’t get a big spring in it to keep the diameter you can bend in the inside and keep most of the strength like this :https://www.stierli-bieger.com/files/Bilder/Produkte/300x225_Anwendungen_biegen/Biegen_bending_17.jpg