Piecing together the details
With the draft plans now approved for the first real working set to be drawn from it’s time I got my arse into gear and started working out the finer details of all the ideas we have for putting the house together.
Today I had the first chance to use the concrete mixer since the conversion to petrol from electric. I am so glad I went for power and spent the extra few dollars on the bigger 6.5HP engine. Even with the added expense of the reducing gears and the clutch it still had trouble spinning 100kg of dry mix. With some water added and a slurry slumping around in the bowl it had no issues even at low revs keeping the mix moving.
So a big tick for that item. When we are using it to make the mix for the house it’ll be a wet bowl with dry ingredients added to it since we need to mix the clay soil to a slurry before cutting it back with the coarse sand and aggregate to get our ideal mix.
I’ve also finished sketching out detailed plans of the molding system. Tomorrow, weather permitting out come the toys and I’ll spend the morning cutting, drilling, screwing and welding together a prototype which I’ll then embed into a concrete slurry and replicate the process we’ll be using to build the house.
I want to be sure it’s as easy to assemble as the prototype I have lurking around the back of my head. From the results of this I’ll then make tweaks if necessary and then go to AJ Stock and order all the steel for the molds we need to make.
Once the system is proven and I can grab a sample of the soil we’ll be using in the mix from our block, the first destruct testing samples can be poured and passed on to the engineers to certify as suitable for load bearing wall.