For years, the best lumber-strut dome hub you could buy was a thermoformed PVC disc with a molded center socket that the strut ends screwed straight into. Then the company vanished — and nothing replaced it. Our proof dome was built with the originals in 2016. It's still standing. So we put the design back into production.
A single tab asks a few screws in one face of the lumber to resist every push, pull, and twist. Here, the strut end seats inside a molded socket — compression goes straight into the hub body, the end-grain screw handles pull-out, and the disc screws only ever see shear. Every load path has its own dedicated geometry.
The disc is a single continuous sheet, hot-formed into a shallow cone — and that changes the physics. Assembled steel joints carry loads through discrete tabs, bolt lines, and bend hinges, every one a stress concentration. Here a load entering from any strut is resisted by the whole disc and shared into every neighbor, and the formed flare gives it shell stiffness — the same reason a dished tank end or a car body panel is stiffer than the flat sheet it came from. There are no joints inside the joint.
◆ Formed to order in our Texas shop — typically ships in about a week
No laser time, no press brake, no powder line, no freight truck — a 3V PVC kit weighs ~16 lb instead of ~240. The savings are real manufacturing economics, not a thinner product. This is the same construction that carried our proof dome for nine years, including a latex-concrete shell.