Scouts Structure Made of Senda

Every summer break Israeli scouts going into a 10 day summer camp in the woods.

There we hand out, teaching our younger scouters important tools of survivability and values to use in their day to day. One of the skills we teach them is how to use eucalyptus logs into forming a buildings or some kind of structure that looks cool or a structure that can be useful in many terms.

In this tutorial I will show you one of the things I've made and guide you into the steps of forming this structure.

Beware Of "The Naga"

There are a few materials required in order to make this structure.

You will need ropes in order to tie down several eucalyptus logs together and forming what

we call a window or a profile.

You will need bamboo and duck tape in order to build a few small items that cannot

be formed with sendas, like the head, spear or hands.

You will need the staple and the fabrics to cover down the structure itself and

make it much more impressive and cool.

You will need a lot of hot glue and lots of wooden skewers in order to build our 3d model which will help us build the real thing.

First of all "The Naga" is just an idea I came up with several friends to build.

There are a lot more structures the Israeli scouts members have build, the main point

is to be creative and find a figure or a real life structure you wish to build in small scall.

We came up with the idea of "The Naga" after a long 3 weeks research so

take your time to find the perfect figure you wish you wish to build.

Sometimes the idea needs to fulfill a need of the camp, in our case we needed

to build a big and hollow structure so it will act as a storage where we can

put everything our camp need such as ropes, papers jerrycans and much more.

This tutorial is a guideline of building a structure and not formally building

"The Naga" itself

After you form the idea of the structure you wish to build its time to try and form it in a software called SketchUp.

This program lets you build a 3d animation with ease and without any required knowledge of how to use the program itself.

This step is crucial in order to have a feeling of how to size the structure.

First of all after you have your idea think for a second, is it similar to anything you know? If so, be sure your not the first one who tried to build it in SketchUp. You can look it up and maybe find a model you can change for your needs. After we decided to build "The Naga" we looked for a snake shaped model since our tail looks very much like a snake tail. We found a model and shaped it to our needs.

After that we start building a windows, which are a 2d form of the shape of the structure. Each window will represent a real window that will be build with sendas later on. In this step you can build windows or profiles. Actually we were the first ones to build a human shape body, so we build it using profiles which was a renovation to scouts building techniques.

After we built our 2d windows and profiles we make connections between them in order to take it into a 3d model. those connections will determine our distance between 2 windows or profiles.

After we made these connections we finally have a 3d figure in the simulation which we can design with colors, as the real figure will be later on. That way we can see which colors we think are best for the real structure.

After our 3d simulation figure is done in SketchUp its time to move things into the real world.

Using SketchUp we can see the real length, wide and height of our connections (which are equal to our eucalyptus logs).

Using SketchUp we printed the windows with all the length's details.

This step is crucial to Step 4.

Using the window sketches we printed in Step 3 we will now form a 3D live model scaled 5:1 - 8:1 (cm per meter) from real life. Means we are going to build a small, yet very detailed, 3d model using wooden skewers and hot glue.

Using our window sketches we can copy that into windows build with skewers and glue and using our animation in SketchUp we can determine the distance between 2 windows in our live 3D model.

In this step calculator is your best friend =)

Step 4 is crucial for this step. In order to build such a big structure using only eucalyptus logs and ropes we will need an Engineer approval of our form. You will have to take your 3d live Model to an engineer and get a feedback of the things your need to change in order to make the structure safe to build.

You will probably have some small changes need.

Finally after getting the structure approved we can now start testing window building in order to get a feeling of how our final structure looks like.

At this step we will also start building our small items needed from bamboos and duck tape, since those take longer time to make and has fine details. In "The Naga" we build the head of the beast, the spear and the hands using bamboo.

This step is important since we had only 3 days to build the whole thing, but even if its a long project for you, you should do some testings in order to see if your happy with the final form of the structure and the fine details.

It is recommended to visit the place you going to build the structure before you actually starting to build it in order to take measurements and see how and where you put every window. Sometimes the ground isn't a perfect fit and some creative ideas will be needed in order to place everything in the specific place you need them to be in.

After we done with our testing we will start build our structure.

First of all we will start building our windows and profiles and place them in the right place we have prechecked.

After we put 2 windows we can start making connections between them using eucalyptus logs. The more connections we make the stronger the structure gets and safer it is to build.

When we are done with this stage we will have our full size structure built, looking

the same as our 3d Model.

After we have done with the built we will move into decorating the structure with our fabrics using our staples.

This is the final step. After our structure is done we only need to place our very detailed pieces made of bamboo in the right place.