A complete account of my Hexayurt Experience at Burning Man.

Time for me to give back with my experience building a hexayurt for burning man. So here goes my attempt at a brain dump.
This is long. I apologize in advance. But I was looking for something like this last August and couldn't find it. So here it is.


First off, photos:
Good photo where you can see some of the details:
www.flickr.com/photos/bar...1926422465/

Holga photo of Karl and the Hexayurt:
www.flickr.com/photos/bar...1926422465/

Our group shot inside the Hexayurt (gives a good perspective on scale)
www.flickr.com/photos/pho...1842908386/

Turkish caravan showing the truck
www.flickr.com/photos/bar...1926422465/



I ran across the hexayurt concept literally a week and half before the day of departure for BM'07. I was immediately turned on by the simplicity of the design as well as how it seemed to be perfectly tailored to handling the burning man environment. I spent pretty much the entire first night devouring all the information I could find on the web. Luckily Vinay gave me all the information I needed to jump in head first. Nice.

By the next day, I was convinced that building a hexayurt was not only doable, but was also a very very good idea. I like to bite off more than I can chew, and building something completely new with only a week to go seemed perfect. Time to call Karl. Karl and I were originally planning on sharing a tent. Karl was balls-in immediately. (you gotta love Karl) Now we were going to be sharing a hexayurt. The plan: full size hexayurt. No messing around here, thank you very much.

So on to supplies.

Tape. I can’t tell you how long I stared at the various tapes in home depot and lowes. I initially called the tape supplier suggested by the hexayurt parts list, but they only had the 3 inch bi-directional filament tape instead of the 6 inch and it would have cost me an extra $100 to overnight the required tape to reach me in time. On to the old standby of… duct tape. So, duct tape. I had no idea how many different types of duct tape there are, and all of them looked deficient. Two main things I was concerned about were heat resistance and width. Initially I was thinking that I just wanted the widest tape I could find (generic 4” stuff), but in the end, I decided upon the scotch brand, 2-1/2 inch super-weather resistant, uber duct tape. I think I ended up with 5 rolls of the stuff, bought from Lowes in San Bruno. As for heat resistance, I also got several rolls of the silver, semi-pliable heating tape (the kind that feels like tin foil and has a peal off backing to it). I have to say, the tape was the biggest unknown to the whole thing since it was the only place where I was straying from the off-the-shelf hexayurt recipe. Also, I’d read a lot of stuff on the web of people’s experiences with duct tape on the playa and was pretty nervous about melting tape. So, next time, start planning with more than a weeks notice and order your damn tape early! Get the 6 inch stuff that’s recommended.

Tuff-R. Found 1” Tuff-R at the home despot in San Mateo. Had a little bit of an issue finding 12 pieces that didn’t have issues (and that was on a fresh palette taken down from the storage up by the ceiling). A lot of pieces were either split in the middle from the stress of shipping, or had strap indentations on the edge because of the way they’re strapped together. Most of the pieces that had been on the showroom floor had been carved in by bored kids while they waited for their parents to buy grout. But I did find 12 pristine sheets. I was lucky enough to have borrowed a Ford Ranger pickup with a lumber rack on the top that perfectly fit the 4X8 sheets, so they strapped down nicely. One thing to note, I bought some 2X4’s to put on top of the foam to keep the straps from cutting into it as I drove on the freeway. They worked ok, but I did end up slightly splitting one of the boards lengthwise from the stress. I reinforced that area with tape. For the actual trip to bm from san francisco, I ended up making a sort of a 2x4 frame that would tightly encapsulate the foam, without putting any undo stress on the foam.

Material preparation: We followed the instructions. One observation is that the wider tape would have made construction much much much faster and easier. With only 2-1/2” tape, we had to be pretty precise when we were doing all the edging in the garage to make sure that we had the tape centered. That slowed things down quite a lot. We still did all the cutting and edging in a night (I think about 3-4 hours total). The only other thing to note is that it’s very very important to have the diagonals cut straight. I was using a 8’ piece of aluminum as a guide for the cutting, but (do the math) had to do 2 passes for each diagonal. My edges were very close to straight, but the few parts where it was off (and only by maybe ¼ inch stray from straight), it made things all the more sketchy. This was mainly b/c of the tape width issues and where these diagonals actually reside in the finished structure. More on this later.

Transport: As you can see from the picture, I built a sort of wooden frame to house the foam while I was on the road. The palettes for our shower acted as a base to provide a relatively uniform area for the foam to rest on. You can also see from the pictures that we had a futon mattress on top and then some bikes. There’s no way I would’ve put the bikes directly on top b/c they’d ruin the foam. The mattress actually provided the perfect cushioning to remove all the pokey bits from the bikes. I don’t think it takes a google employee to figure out that the truck was WAY over loaded. I was a little concerned about the foam acting as a wing of sorts and providing lift to the truck making it less maneuverable. In the end, we had so much shit piled on that poor truck that it didn’t make a difference. It handled like a boat. As soon as I hit the freeway, I knew that it was going to be a very slow trip. Karl earned his ‘good buddy’ merit badge award by tailing me all the way there while I drove 45mph to keep an eye on my load, lest I should lose my load crossing the mountains. I’m sure there’s a ‘load spotting’ merit badge, but I don’t want to get into the details of that. Besides, you probably earn that badge at burning man, not on the way.

Construction: We pulled in to hushville at around 8 or 9 am. Karl and I were both bm virgins, so we quickly started to get that “man… that sun is really getting hot” feeling. Two minutes later, we were both realizing that we needed to get shade and FAST. Thirty seconds later, I was sun burned. Another 3 minutes and Karl died of heat stroke. First things first. Hexayurt. So, big surprise to all of our other camp-mates, out pops the hexayurt kit. Who would’ve guessed? We laid it all out and followed the directions as best as we could from the memorized steps. Popping the roof up to connect all the pieces was a little tricky, but we managed ok. Everything went together relatively easily. Again, 6” tape would have made things sooooooo much easier. No need to be exact when you’ve got 4 spare inches to play with. On the whole, it went together as it shows in the videos. A little bit of jostling. A little bit of coaching of the various players to get everything lined up. We did little 6-9” pieces of tape to quickly join the roof to the walls and get everything lined up before doing the official joins. Since we were using duct tape for the joint where the wall meets the roof, we taped around the whole structure several times just to be safe. We used the silver heat reflective tape to join everything together for the roof panels, figuring that they’d get the most direct heat abuse. As you can see in the pictures, we also did some tape crosswise over the joints just to shore things up.

Some notes/thoughts/questions on construction:
-> The reflection off the pieces when you’re putting everything together is brutal. It’s literally like taking a mirror and reflecting the sun directly under your sun hat and into your nostrils. Very very painful. We ended up having a rug that we would throw over the reflecting bit for whoever got unlucky enough to have to hold a piece and get reflected upon. Usually it was one person or the other.
-> All told, I think it took us about an hour to put up. This was the first time we did this, so I think we did pretty good. I had made a model out of 3x5 cards though… Do it yourself. It helps.
-> So the roof is made of 6 isosceles triangles. These triangles join where the diagonals were cut. And since there’s the joint involved in bringing two, one inch pieces of foam together with square edges, there’s a gap. That’s where the trouble will be if you’re not careful when cutting the diagonals. Unless you have 6 inch tape… which is my new mantra.
-> It was pretty tricky getting the last few seams of the roof taped up. We used a long piece of pvc with a T joint at the end as a sort of, well, stick thing, to push the tape down. I’m still not sure what a good way to get those last few seams sealed well. If you think about it, you’re trying to tape something that’s about 9 feet away from you.
-> I still don’t know exactly how the anchors are supposed to work. I took 6 pieces of ½ inch pvc (each 6” long) and secured them to the center of each roof panel with a couple of pieces of tape. The tape started about 4’ up the roof, covering the center seam, ran the tape down towards the wall, taped the pvc up against the roof panel, and then continued the tape into the inside of the yurt and taped to the inside of the roof another 4’. Once everything was all taped up and secure, we tied down these anchors to rebar by passing rope through the pvc (you can see one in the detail pic). This apparently did the trick. Something that worked well was to hammer the rebar in, rope the anchors to the rebar, then hammer the rebar a few more times just to get the rope really taught. I was very confident in tying everything down b/c the structure just feels so solid once it’s all taped together.
-> If you look at the detailed picture, you can see that we covered the tape for the anchors in plastic. We were paranoid about the rain weakening one of these and then the whole thing falling apart. Not sure if that did anything or not. I’d like to rework how I did the anchors or get some better guidance or ideas on ways to secure them.


Ok. So it’s up. It’s ready. It’s impressive. So here’s my notes on the experience.
- First off, being my first time at BM. It was absolutely great to have this very spacious place to crash in and escape from everything. There’s nothing but privacy and lots of room. I had a queen size air mattress inside and Karl had a regular sleeping bag/mat type thing. 2 lawn chairs, a bunch of plastic tubs full of crap, a cooler, etc. You get the picture. It’s spacious. It’s wonderful. Let me repeat. IT’S WONDERFUL!! It really does make it so that you can stay out there longer. I was there from Monday morning till Sunday afternoon. I think I would’ve bugged out earlier if it hadn’t been for the yurt.
- Temperature: we were regularly the last ones up in our camp b/c everyone else was in the classic tent-under-an-easyup setup and were forced out of their tents from the heat about 1-2 hours earlier than we were. By around 11am, it would start to get pretty stuffy. I tried the window with the heater filter and it did help a little. But overall, you couldn’t really hang out comfortably in the hexayurt in the heat of the day. There just wasn’t any breeze getting in.
- Mist: I’d read that you could mist the inside and it would drop the temperature down. We had one of those garden misters that you can pump up and spray a fine mist and we did this several times when things got rough. It never really dropped the temperature all that much. Not sure if we needed a finer mist or what. Ended up just spraying yourself to cool off instead of the inside of the yurt.


Weather: Again, it was my first time there, but the dust storms were apparently some of the most sustained and some of the worst. I’m from Florida. I’m familiar with hurricane force winds. The winds on Thursday and Friday were pretty damn close to hurricane force in my book. Definitely a good solid tropical storm if nothing else. Let me tell you, being in the hexayurt was exhilarating and scary all at the same time. Because I was stressing over the inferior tape, I was very worried that things were gonna turn pear shaped. The roof was bowing. The walls were shaking. The door kept blowing in. The foam was making crackling sounds as it flexed. But it was rockstar all the way. It weathered two severe wind storms and probably could’ve done another 5 without any problems. One more time… if we’d had 6” tape, we could’ve gone to mars in our hexayurt and been ok. (we may have on day 3, but the pictures and memories came back blurry) Friday it was supposed to rain (and did a little) and again I was panicked that the rain would ruin the tape and it would all blow away, but again, it held solid. We did throw a tarp over the top to fend off a little of the rain. What a sound that made when the tarp was whipping the yurt. Crazy. One fantastic thought was that, if any portion of the tape did fail, the whole structure would collapse and be sucked up into the sky in an impressive display.

As for the dust, all of our stuff was almost completely protected from dust, whereas everyone’s stuff was completely covered. I guess the dust comes up under a tent’s rainfly and in through the top vents, so no matter what you do, you stuff is covered in a layer of dust after a dust storm. Unless, of course, you’ve built a hexayurt. There was almost no dust at all. The only dust that got in came in under the walls. I didn’t do anything to really try and seal the tarp to the walls, so some inevitably blew in. Some also got in from the door since it can’t really create an air-tight seal. But there was very little dust and several of our campmates came in to escape the dust and be able to take their masks off for a while.



And finally: teardown. Way too easy. Unfortunately, I knew it was going in the landfill to be found 8 million years later. I think if I’d had a 3/16 piece of plywood for top and bottom to make a sandwich, I could’ve transported the whole thing in a way that made it last more than one trip. Next time, and with wider tape.


Next time:
get recommended tape early... maybe I’ll do it tomorrow
Make a plywood sandwich to transport and protect the foam walls.
Figure out a better way to get a good cross breeze going.


There. I’ve done it. If you’ve read this far, then I’ll see your hexayurt at BRC next year!

Vinay, I suspect that you will have read this far. Just want to say a big thanks for all the time and effort you’ve put into this project and all the resources you have made available. It’s impressive and inspiring.

-Big Barley