[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.
During an emergency I’d rather smoke a joint to keep me calm.
Healthier than PVC fumes, too.
As long as that stuff stay out of sunlight, it’ll be fine. If not, those cable ties will eventually break.
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.
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.