Introducing the Lima Shelter
A couple of weeks ago we were contacted by iFurniture, a group in Lima Peru that was interested in the Shelter 2.0 design. They were affiliated with the FabLab there and were looking at housing options for the thousands of people that had been effected by the recent flooding there.
They were building one of our Shelter 2.0 designs using the original files on GitHub which was very exciting, but there were some changes that Robert and I had been working on that improved the design while making it more material efficient. This need for shelters in Peru was the spark we needed to finish up those changes, and the Lima Shelter has just been uploaded to Github.
Changes in this version
- The original design had stringers that slotted into the ribs. This meant that the ribs had to be deep enough to have a slot cut half way through for the stringers. In the Lima Shelter we use a purlin detail that we had been using in our smaller 8x8 Shelter. This let us make the ribs a little smaller without affecting the overall footprint, giving a little more interior room.
- In the first version the rib parts were connected with a half-lap joint. This was slow to cut and a potential weak point, so we converted it to a bolted splice. This reduced the cutting time by quite a bit while still being strong.
- Fastening parts by screwing into the edge of plywood is weak and always something to be avoided, so Robert and I had developed a bolted “telephone” connection to eliminate that problem in a lot of our furniture designs. To simplify and strengthen the Lima Shelter we used a variation of the telephone connection that used screws instead of bolts, screwed into plywood wedges embedded into the parts so that the screws thread into their faces instead of the edges of the parts.
- The endwalls have been simplified. No one really likes the two-piece doors in the original design so these file have a single centered door. This makes it easy to make a solid endwall by cutting a few extra holes around the perimeter and mounting the “door stop” pieces on the outside of the endwall instead of the inside.
- There’s were some areas on the shorter Floor panels that were previously waste material. Anne and Gary of AtFAB fame have graciously allowed us to nest a couple of their designs into these areas. They are on their own layers and cutting these is optional, but cutting them helps a Shelter resident start out with a couple of stools and a table. We can’t thank Anne and Gary enough for allowing us to include these design files!
- We do most of our design work in VCarvePro…it’s the software hammer that hits our hands the best!…and supply files in their .crv format. Unfortunately there are some folks that don’t have access to VCarvePro so we have to convert all those design files to .dxf files, which means that all the toolpathing information in the .crv file is lost, along with features like displaying notes when a file is opened. We’re excited to be working with our friends at Vectric to find ways to allow those crv files to be used in the full-featured trial version of VCarvePro! This will allow us to share our settings and allow users of the trial version to make a limited number of changes and generate toolpaths.
All these changes added two more sheets of 1/2" material, but eliminated 11 sheets of 3/4" material…a sizeable savings in both materials and time
(Potential) Issues
There are a couple of things that haven’t been done yet. but are on the list of things to do:
- Most importantly we haven’t applied a sharing license to these new files. It’s a little more complicated for a couple of reason: we want to make sure that the AtFAB files are licensed correctly, and if we can work out a way to share files in a more VCarve-friendly way there may be some restrictions on those files. If you want to use the files before we add a license, just send us an email at info@shelter20.com and we’ll get you going.
UPDATE: We have updated the GitHub repository for the Shelter 2.0 portion of the files with our standard Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Non-Commercial license. We will update the license for the AtFAB files ASAP
- All the parts have been cut individually but a whole Shelter hasn’t yet. We’ve been using the same design process for a while so are fairly confident, but there can always be small problems (or potentially some big ones) that don’t show up until a full prototype is built. We’ll report back after we’ve cut and assembled a whole Lima Shelter, but until then consider these Beta files and understand that details may/will change. So if you’re thinking about cutting one, wait until the last minute to download the files!
- There are currently no assembly instructions and very little information on cutting the files. There’s a Sketchup model that’s close to being current, and the layer names are pretty descriptive which will hopefully be helpful. At some point more complete instructions will be available, but until then you’re pretty much on your own.
- All the files are in inches. I’d like to say that there is a sensible reason for that, but its mostly because that’s what we work in and we’re culturally insensitive dinosaurs!
As a teaser we’ve also posted the files for our smaller 8'x8' on GitHub. Most of the info and issues above also apply to them, but with many fewer parts they at least are less complicated!
And just to reiterate, the Lima Shelter is named after the city in Peru and not the bean!
