Igloo building: blocks, sheets, triangles, volumes, areas and glue
Following on from preparation and initial mincing, the next things to decide on where how to create the chicken wire skeleton, and how the blocks would be attached to the substrate given the extra complication of a white sheet in between the two.
Chicken wire dome
Chicken wire will be great as a skeleton, as it's relatively easy to shape, but can still be nice and sturdy if you need it to be. The mesh structure will be really useful for anchoring it into the ground, and attaching the coverings, too. However, it only bends nicely around one axis at a time, as it barely compresses or expands as a sheet at all. That means making cylinders of chicken wire and expecting to be able to stack and bend them into a dome is not going to work.
What I'll do instead is to cut 16 equally sized isosceles triangles, chain the bases (b) together into a loop, then stitch neighboring long sides (l) together, eventually joining all the acute vertices at the top of the dome.
It's pretty likely this won't hold its own weight particularly well, so I may need a single vertical pole in the middle of the dome.
Attaching the blocks
The polystyrene blocks must be secure (because of the wind), quick to put on, and easy to take off. And as the polystyrene itself is awkward to work with, I'll do as much of the hard work as possible before leaving for Nevada. The best solution seems to be to attach the blocks onto strips of white fabric, measured to fit around the igloo in courses. These strips will be useful in keeping everything together during transport, and make it super easy to attach and detach the blocks once on the playa.
I wasn't sure about how to permanently bind polystyrene onto fabric; I wasn't sure until I found This to That. Hot glue!
As for attaching the fabric strips to the sheet and chicken wire underneath, I'm not sure. However, I do know that it's a much easier problem to solve than dealing with the blocks.
Next up: trying to make custom blocks of polystyrene, working out how much chicken wire I need, finding suppliers and finally the pre-build prep work!
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