Steampunk Treehouse — Coachella update — Spreader Bar

The other item that has been taking up some of my time is the design of the spreader bar for the Coachella instillation.

What is a spreader bar

Well, we are going to need to pick up the house with a crane and place it on the trunk.  To do this we are going to attach straps to the three main house supports which will go up to the cranes hook.

But because the cranes hook will be above the center of the house the straps are going to go up at an angle.  This angle will cause the straps to go into the hose.

If we had really, really long straps  the angle would be very small and would clear the house, but we don’t.

So we need to make sure the straps go straight up until they clear the house and then angle in as the go up to the cranes hook.

That is where the spreader bar comes in.

It’s a 15′ equlatral triangle (made of 3″x3″ square tube with 0.25″ walls), with 2 3/8″ plates bolted together at the three vertex.  These plates have two large holes in them.  We will attach a strap to each of these holes.  One of the straps will go straight down to the house pick points and the the other will go up to the cranes hook.

I designed this with engineering input from our pal Corbett at Instinct.

Last week I cut the 30 degree angle in the 3″ square tube.  This was a touch tricky because the 30 degrees is not along the face but the vertex of the square tube.

This weekend we are going to fabricate the plates and then weld the plates to the bars.

I’ll take some pictures so you can get a sense of what this all really looks like,