30 ft yurt from scratch

[Bob Rowlands]

If you have a doweling jig, go ahead and dowel it. But you gotta be fast, because glue sets up in dowels, and biscuits, real fast. Do a trial run through ratchet clamp to work out the bugs before you glue anything. You gotta get that ratchet strap on there very fast before Titebond type aliphatic waterproof glue sets up. You literally have minutes to work.

Get everything on the subfloor. Have the ratchet strap close to size and ready to go. Layout the wax paper. Glue a joint. Assemble it. Glue a joint. Assemble it. etc. till fully assembled. Get the ratchet strap around the ring and lightly tighten. Beat tap whatever until it looks good and tighten some more. Place the top waxed paper on top of that, set the hold down ply on top of the ring so segments buckle up in final clamp down, and quickly screw the lid to the subfloor. Then tighten that ratchet clamp pronto. A friend that is very handy could be a BIG help in the glue up. This is one way, the cheap way, I'd do it. There are others of course.

As for gluing the rings together, plane so they sister up nicely. Make witness marks once you are happy. Glue it and clamp it. Then bore the holes and through bolt.

As for strength, beats the heck out of me. I am not an engineer. My ring is on a 16' yurt, and it is plenty strong even with the heaviest snow load around here. But not as beefy as I think yours is gonna be. Good luck.

[Bob Rowlands]

WHOOPS! Make that, "...so segments DO NOT buckle up in final clamp down,..."

[IamJohnGalt]

Although I haven't been updating this post regularly, I thought I would share now how the rest of the build went.
When I last posted I was debating the merits of boring and doweling each segment of my compression ring prior to gluing. Perhaps out of a tendency to overbuild, I decided to go ahead with the dowels which had the nice upside of keeping the pieces of wood perfectly aligned. I also added a fourth layer to the compression ring bringing the final height to 6". I made this decision because I planned on using 2x6s for the rafters and the taller ring made for a better fit. I decided to stain the ring on the bottom and sides (areas viewable from inside the yurt) to better match the red oak look of the lattice. I drilled 48 3/8" holes evenly spaced around the compression ring and made corresponding holes in the rafter ends to receive a 3/8 steel rod. Finally, brackets were mounted to secure the rafters and prevent any racking.
I then cut all the 2x6s to the proper size and cut a groove for the cable and rounded the edges to eliminate any hard wear spots on the roofing material.

[Jafo]

Really looks good so far!

[IamJohnGalt]

For the inner liner of the yurt, I purchased tablecloth fabric that was 10' wide. I attached grommets every 2' on the wall portion of the fabric to hang from the cable. The roof cloth I stapled in place to the rafters, and hid the seams along the rafter lines. I would have preferred to sew the roof covering as a single unit but working alone it was difficult to keep two 10' wide strips of fabric 40' long aligned and pull them through my singer sewing machine.
I wrapped the structure in a bubble foil style

insulation

, using the same template to cut the roof as I later used to cut the Vinyl roof cover.
At this point I found someone local with access to industrial fabric welding equipment and I approached him about helping me with making the cover for the yurt. After several trips to his shop to lay out the roof and cut the template, the few welds that had to be made were done and a valance band was added with a channel for a heavy duty webbing to run through, to be tensioned at the roof/wall seam for a snug fit. Unfortunately I lost many of the pictures I had taken to document these processes but I have included a picture of the roof

insulation

after the template was cut, a picture of the finished khana wall (along with some unprocessed rafters and my dog Lola) as well as a picture of the erected wooden frame, and the final completed structure

[Jafo]

It looks really solid! Good job!

[Bob Rowlands]

Yeah, nicely done.