DIY gridbeam

I am experimenting making grid beam. First, what is the best accuracy with the stuff just lying around the workshop?

I found some wood and carefully cut it to 40mm wide.

Measure with calipers not a ruler! We want this to be accurate!

I brought a bunch of m6 bolts. The cheapest available at bunnings (local box store)
long ones are 90mm, for bolting two pieces together. short ones are 50, for bolting a “skin” to a beam.

I found a piece of aluminium and made a template. It has 400 mm worth of holes. Then I mark it through the holes with a punch, then drill it. I don’t drill it through the template because it’s only aluminium which is too soft. It would wear the hole out. If it was steel that would work, but this is what I had lying around.

It worked. Looks accurate enough. I wouldn’t know for sure until I had assembled a tri-joint.

The “tri joint” or “xyz joint”. three pieces bolted together. It needs to be fairly accurate for this to work. Because all three faces press into each other, it’s pretty sturdy.

Whats next? make more gridbeam of course!

I made some longer beams, to check the accuracy of my holes I two together at several points along them. The holes lined up!

(The mallet is to get the bolts through. The holes are very snug, and wood has lots of friction. A better way is to use an electric drill with a 10mm socket.)

I made enough to make some thing actually useful: a rack for holding spare gridbeam.

to be continued...

@bob I had a similar reaction when I first saw @dinosaur's stuff. needs more triangles!

They do also have "skins", which gives the same effect, and some designs have diagonal wires.

I bet with wood, you could include thin sheet metal and it wouldn't be thick enough to prevent an xyz joint.

If you had a thin strip of metal, if it had the same hole spacing you could make a square 3,4,5 triangle.
(the ancient egyptians used a rope knotted into 12 equal sections to make a 3,4,5 right angle triangle which they used for surveying fields. The annual flooding of the Nile would tend to wipe away boundary markers)

If you wanted a 45 degree diagonal bracing, you'd need a piece with hole spacing sqrt(2)*40 = 56.568 ...

That spin cycle was pretty good. New Zealand is a rocky country generally, but it was always hard to tell if it was a small earthquake or the washing machine.

All praise @dinosaur for making such a sweet url to put on the drilling template!