# Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [310]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2015-01-13 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Built evidence: plywood variant of the shelter.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of... (suggested by machine)
  - Laziness, Impatience and Hubris (2011): Talk at c-base, Berlin: Larry Wall's three virtues of a programmer applied to building, by a hackitect. (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Hexayurt shelter design & project — tape, hexayurt, roof (53%); Burning Man shelter building (27%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: solar light (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 1 undated); Pakistan (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); Haiti (1 here; 42 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.30 (1.00 is the top), number 251 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): close in content (cosine 0.87)
  - [727] [Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md): close in content (cosine 0.86)
- On the same works, just before: [384] [test (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/384.md); [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md); [311] [Vinay Gupta - Proof of Work / IAmSatoshi (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/311.md)
- On the same works, just after: [305] [ChangeHow - rough camera video of Vinay Gupta's talk on... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/305.md); [756] [Change:HOW #17 Vinay Gupta (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/756.md); [234] [zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » WARLORDS, INC BOOK LAUNCH!!! (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/234.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To, video, 2015-01-13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [310], https://guptaoption.com/texts/310.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=0s) It's funny because, you know, having six sides, it's always hard to get a real sense of how big the hexayurt is or our eyes are so used to four-sided buildings. Yeah. Can I ask you a favor? Could you walk around the hexayurt? I just want No. Come around this side. I'm just trying to give people a sense of the scale because being six-sided, it's quite hard to estimate how big it is. There we go. Thank you. So, we laid out some camping mats inside to give a sense of actual scale. And now, normally the door would be a bit higher than that. There we are. So, how was that with five occupants? Pretty big. Quite spacious. Oh, that's pretty big for a camping thing. Not to live in good for sex. I would Yeah. You don't want to want to go into the door as well. A baby in a cup. No, with like with possessions of course like white people may have all been blown away. Well, it's it's fair standard for 4 and a half. But the sort of sensible construction is to put one person on each wall. Yeah. And then you've got this sort of centered chair space. If you had more of a smoke hole, you could use it for cooking. See if we can see those folks in there. All right. Splendid. I guess you could add another piece on top to give you a smoke without rain. Yeah. Or, you know, just run the stove pipe right up from the center of the floor up and out. Very nice. Well, in cold climates, you put a layer of insulation on the inside. Yeah. something something just you'd staple it on probably. All right, there we are.

[1:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=119s) Yeah. So, uh, we laid the boards out like this to check that they're exactly 1.2x 2.4 because sometimes the boards come in 1.2x 2.5. So, that's why we lay them out this way. And these guys are marking up the boards to make sure that they are uh to actually get the diagonal line. You can see it going across in the corner. Okay, there's the diagonal line. Actually, we have an angle, don't we? So, uh we're just going to make the template here for the 150° blocks. Grab that for a second. We're using a pair of uh uh cutters as compass. Yeah. So each one of these is obviously going to be 100 and uh is going to be 60° and we want 150. So there's our there's our primary circle. 60 60 60 60. So we want 1 2 and a half. And that will give us our 150°. We get our half by making that bisection. So we bisect that line and that will give us an accurate 150° angle. I mean might be off by a few degrees, but it's certainly less than the measurement error of the cut with the saw. Sponge.

[4:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=244s) Okay. So, let's see how the build is going. Particularly the walls first. Yep. So, I'm liking your door here. Are you liking our new new design? It's It's absolutely art. It actually looks like two eyes and a nose. I I don't believe that was the plan. It was just port holes was the idea. And we love the arch idea. We managed to do all this with absolutely no measuring materials. We did it literally with a piece of string and a pen. Piece of string and a pen. Very good. So, there's our wall. Let's uh take a little tour. Here's the blocks. It's a different way of doing the blocks. Uh it takes a lot more cutting, but it loses less wood. I'll show you the profile. There it is. Uh this is the Sri Lankan corner that I mentioned before. So, this is uh 6 in by 6 in. And we take that corner off so that the wall radius comes inside of the roof radius. One block at the top. And I'll show you on the inside. One block at the bottom. There's our pile of spare blocks. This will hold the roof on. Uh these are the roof triangles. So you screw one block on the inside of each one. Uh they're overlap by the thickness of one block. It's the thickness of a 2x4, so it's probably 1.75 in. Uh they all have to be oriented the same way in terms of left over right, right over left. Quite important. That screw should come in just a little further. It's too close. Okay. It's good enough, actually. Sorry. You're You're right enough. Okay. It's okay. Okay. And once we got the roof triangles done, we're going to do an awkward little bit of cutting and then we're going to build the roof cone.

[5:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=350s) Okay. So, here's the uh top side of the board where um the original shape was basically like this. That's the square end of the board like so. So, we cut this piece off and a similar piece from the underneath like that. And this is what makes the uh space for the boards to overlap on each other at the very point. So, the midpoint of the board uh is right um so the original board comes up kind of like this. So, the first thing we do is we cut across that point and then we cut this section out which is parallel to this edge of the board. and underneath a similar piece which is parallel to that side of the board. And that's what gives you this roof overlap. Sorry, I haven't done a great job of explaining it, but it's pretty easy when you actually have a board in your hand.

[6:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=401s) Okay, camera's running. Just keep it pointed at things. So, bring over another roof triangle, please. Uh, all right. Let's be doing that one again. Get a drill. Fix it. The screw must have been a little close to the edge. Okay. Come back. So, this is about how the roof pieces will go. You see? And actually, it's this side goes over like that. You see how they catch to tuck those corners in. And what we're going to do is we're going to screw the wooden blocks on the inside. And the way that we actually do it is we screw the wooden blocks to the inside of the board and then slot them together like a module. But this is why we cut those funny bits out of the triangle. Do you want to bring the camera around here? We don't need that one yet. Up against the shed. Bring the camera around here. We can show how the little wooden bits over. So, how does this pass it to me here? Come right close and show it. So that's the overlap of the pieces where each roof piece rests on the one beside it. And that's what forms your roof strength. Each one over the one before. Can you lift that board up just a second? Yeah. So there's where the notch has been cut from the board. And then lower it down. And that's where it meets the notch cut on the underside of the other one. That's much better. Okay. Is it coming down? Yep. Okay. Three. So, same. Sorry, I'm about to explain it again. This time for the film. We still don't have good film documentation in making this kind of hexayurt. So, you measure back. Block goes about halfway up the wall, little below halfway. Measure back the thickness of the block. And then you're going to screw it in position like this. Actually, like that. So, the other piece of wood wedges right into that corner.

[9:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=551s) Do you want to come close in so we can see how that's done? Just wedge right in against like that. Screwed from the outside. This edge parallel to that edge. That'll do it. You can just close the lid. Actually, this is probably the better way to do it. It's a little easier this way. Here we are. Good and tight. And then the other board will just slide up against that and into place.

[9:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=590s) You know, I often call it the little shack that could, you know, cuz it's clearly not quite a house, but it's definitely better than a tent. And the thing is, if it was four times the price of a tent, it really wouldn't be worth doing. But at a quarter of the price of a tent, it's it's actually quite a technology. Ah, did I hear somebody's just discovered the problem at the end? Yeah, someone go inside. Someone's got to go inside. That is correct. Actually, for safety reasons, it's best to put about four or five people inside so the roof cannot fall on them. Also, it helps with the blackmail potential. Okay. Can you cameraman? Sure. It's rolling just on. So for these two blocks, you have to align it so that the uh surface of the block lines up smoothly with the roof here. So it's the opposite of insetting it on this side. On this side you inset, on this side you outset. And the alignment is so that it's this the surface of this block line catches this corner smoothly. And that way the roof piece just fits right over there. And you can screw down into this from the outside. It all works just so.

[11:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=669s) Go. So, uh, we're just going to drop the solar light in here so you guys can actually see what you're going. Just show the solar panels on the back, lights on the front. Tada. All right. So, now you can see what you're doing. Disco mode. They're really quite pretty. Actually, I should get them to put a disco mode in them. That'd be excellent. All right. Now, final piece. Okay. So, you're going to slide it in on one side. Gently, gently, gently, gently. Try not to lose the There you go. That's the plan. That's the plan. Nicely done. Down it comes. Down it comes, I think. Okay. Now, okay. Now, hang on. So we want to slide it on those blocks so it comes under the other side. Right. What are your last wishes? Gordon. This might be a job for hand power rather than leg power. It's kind of a precision operation. Don't put pressure on the middle. There we go. Slide it in. I was really sliding. We're just holding. Okay. Why are we not sliding? Yeah. There you go. Easy. Okay. Now, it needs to move up. So, we need to push it up some. Okay. Now, somebody wants to take this. Do you guys have that line? You need to come up a little more. Got a bit of a gap at the top. See this corner? Yeah. That side. Remember that side? It goes over rather than under. So, don't worry about that side yet. Let's get this side right first. There we go. That's it. Close enough. Now, who's going to do the screws? You're going to do the screws. Uh, lightweight person. Okay. Well, do this one here. Yeah. Do that one there. Here or there? Just par to the screw. Just move behind. No, no, no. We should do here. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's give it a try. If we miss, we'll do it again.

[13:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=819s) Is someone pressing at the other side? Oh, no. Solid. Nicely done. Okay. Now, who's gonna take a crack at this one up here? Do you want to give it a shot? You're pretty light. Me. Yeah. Put Put this Give it a try. Here. Let me take your other arm. No problem. Okay. No, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. Here. Get It's not going to work because you're putting your weight on your leg. Should just hold his back here. Grab that. Keep that camera pointed here. I'll put you grab my hand. Okay. Forward you go. Oh my god. Ah. More people. More people. Yeah. Human chain. Yeah. Pull back. Okay. All right. Now, let's see how this one's doing. So, we just need to tuck this over here a little bit in there. Yeah, just a little. So, can you guys push the whole roof up just a tiny bit? Lift the roof up just about two inches. That perfect. Okay, there we go. Yes. Are you going top or bottom first? So for this Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fingers clear. Keep it clean now, guys. Yeah. And one. So first sex here, huh? Yeah. You guys are going to have Jake to take the design back to Pakistan with you. Okay. So now we're going to do this thing again here. Somebody want to hold the camera. Just keep it pointing at something useful. Bit further up. Should be

[16:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=969s) one. You can lean forward. I got you. That's Beautiful. Well done. Okay. So, now the magic. So, put three people on every wall. Every wall. Three people on every wall. Okay. Nobody touch anything until we get three people in every wall and everybody follow my instructions. One. No, not your instructions. My instructions. Okay. So, you're each you're each going to be lifting about 10 or 15 pounds of weight because there are so many. So, it's a very gentle lift. Okay. Everybody inside? You guys ready, too? So, what's going to happen is we're going to lift it up and then we're going to hold it where we are. So, we're going to lift it up to full height and we're not going to move around any. All right. So, ready and lift slowly and gently. There are so many people. It's an easy lift. Gently. Gently. Keep lifting. Okay. Now, lift further so it's easier. Once you're lifting at shoulder height, it weighs less. That's right. That's right. So, everybody who's free, go inside. Now very slowly, very slowly begin to walk towards the hexayurt. Right. Very slowly and then pass the weight to the people inside. And then Right. And then run around the other side of the building cuz you're going to take it when it comes to the back. Gently. Gently. Keep going. Gently. That better? Now keep going slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. Okay, now you Now we need more people. Wait, stop right here. Now we need more people on the outside. Okay, so people on the outside. Now lower very gently. Keep it lined up at the corners and mind your fingers. Okay, needs to come towards me just a little. There we go. Yes. Nicely done, folks. It's nicely done. Woo!

[18:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=1119s) Excellent. Now, we're going to put on some more screws just to hold all the roof on properly, but that is the process. Lovely. Lovely.

[18:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=1131s) There. Okay. Or do I do it through both of them? Well, let me um just film. So, this is a 120 block and it goes right under the section where those two pieces of roof cross. There we are. Okay. And then oops, you're going to have to back that one out again. I wasn't holding it strongly enough cuz I was fooling around with the camera. There we go. And then from the inside, you put in another screw and that locks it onto the roof. And those basically just stabilize the roof together. Okay.

[20:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=1207s) There we go. Backwards. There you go. Wow. Look, I can even put my hands up. Yeah. Yeah. It's an 8ft high roof. Oh, quite spacious. Well, I wouldn't be too um too miffed if I had to live here. Yeah, it's not too bad, is it? Thank you very much for inviting me up to build. Thanks very much for coming. It's been a pleasure. I love it. Pop out now.

[20:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=1235s) Yeah. Well, I mean, for Burning Man, people typically have so much equipment with them that they just, you know, gang carry like stuff on tracks. So, how many people do we have in here now? What is that? 17. 17. We still got some space in the middle. Come on in. Come on in. It's a hex, not a clown car. You get loads of Yeah. It would be great for a party. 100 100 quid worth of materials. Coming to Glastonbury Secret Garden party and everywhere else near you. This is why they're so popular for, you know, like the festivals in America because they're just it's a ton of shelter for not much money. Well, you don't have to build them out wood. You can use corrugated plastic. And if you work with corrugated plastic and tape, they can be folding. Yeah. Vandals. Vandals. So, the hexayurt experience half the price of a relief tent. Lasts three times as long. About the same size. What do you reckon? 5 years before they're all over the world. Maybe 10. Thought they already were all over the world. Well, they've been in every continent now, aren't they? Every continent. Test units only, though. Right. Antarctica. Antarctica. Well, if you were going to make it out of nice thick structural insulated panel, why not? Very similar to England anyhow. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Mongolian Mongolian yurts or gs. And basically every culture has a shack or a hut which is about this size, which is what they used to live in. You know, the English had benders and these old post and beam things with thatch roofs. N houses.

[22:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdP6Wsv0bQ&t=1377s) And okay, 18 people, three on each side. Don't lift before. You got three on each side. Okay. And you want to focus your lift right at the corners where the where the hexayurt is screwed down to the wall. So put your hands close to the corners. Okay. Yeah. For the people who are at the corners, hold by the corners. Everybody else hold by the middle. Okay. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to go straight back towards that no fire sign. see it. And we're only going to go about 5 ft. So the count of three, lift very slowly. One, two, three. And then walk about 5T towards the no fire sign. So this is the relocatable building thing, right? And stop and down. Right. So what you do is you actually screw some additional bits of wood to it. Go on. Clap. That was good. Nice. Right. So, what you do is you'd screw some additional bits of wood to it to make a frame to carry it by. Then you'd get 20 people to carry it on their shoulders. You just walk somebody's house to where they were going to live next. And that means you can build semi-permanent structures that you can still relocate if you've got to move your camps. For example, in Haiti, you could build hexayurts and if they got to be relocated 5 miles to a new center, you can do it. Would not want to carry that five miles. You would want to carry it five miles, but it's a slow process and you've got lots of manual labor on hand. All right. So, thank you. Oh, yeah. Mongolian fire sale. Here we go. There's the roof. See, in the final verse, I'm just going to run this backwards. There we go. Nice work, folks. Maybe Beautiful work. Nice.

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End of [310] Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [305](https://guptaoption.com/texts/305.md) ChangeHow - rough camera video of Vinay Gupta's talk on... (2015); the most closely related, [752](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md) Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.