Week notes #6
[These weeknotes started in late 2021 in the lead up to the release of WikiHouse Skylark, as a weekly update for our WikiHouse Slack community. Follow the link to find out more about the community and how to join.]
Happy new year everyone! Hope 2022 has started really well for you- it has been quite busy over here in the last few days, plenty going on to tell you about..
First of all, a team update: We grew the WikiHouse team over the holidays! Gabriele Granello is our new WikiHouse Engineering Lead. He is a structural engineer, who has worked as a researcher in academia for the past 7 years with a focus on timber structures. He is joining the team to help the development of Skylark from a structural perspective, and to make sure the system is safe and sound. Gabriele has hit the ground running this week and is currently at Edinburgh Uni catching up with the team doing the structural testing (more on that below). He is also preparing the Skylark engineering guide.
The new website is looking beautiful. And we are looking for people to help us test it. Are you interested? DM me if you want to be involved. Testing will take place towards the end of the month.
And, since we are getting close to our launch date of 10 February 2022, we are now starting to plan an online event for the community during March. Date tbc but I will let you know as soon as we have it.
Finally on testing news…
We have been testing a new Skylark beam configuration that can accommodate spans of up to 5.4 meters (longer beams than we have had in the past, roughly 10% longer). This will allow for more flexible configurations in the architectural layout. Preliminary tests are encouraging*, and they suggest that such spans can be safely achieved. More data will be available soon.
*the juicy details are:
The failure load (18-24 kiloNewton) is similar to what we observed in the past.
The way they fail, i.e. compression of the stitched joint (see picture below), is actually a very desirable failure mode because it is ductile (i.e the opposite of fragile)