Ayres Rocks

I shot off an email to the Mid Murray Council development and planning officer we have been conversing with over the past few months. I listed what we had so far to seek the planning approval and he responded back with the OK on what we have, plus all the forms we would need to complete before lodging our application.

This experience is very different from the suburban council we spent the last 7 years living in. The response to every enquiry there always seemed as if we were creating work for them. How dare we pay rates and expect service I guess.

On a bum note, the concrete vibrator arrived Monday, was broken, looked decidedly second hand and was certainly a far inferior quality then the “best quality tool, don’t pay $1500 elsewhere” advertised on the Ebay listing. The seller has ignored me for 24 hours so far, another 24 hours and I will make their name absolute mud and leave no one searching Google for details about them in any doubt that this retailer will rip your off.

I’m also posting them the link to this post, because this is where I will shame them.

Word to the wise AG#$^%^.I’m a webmaster who controls somewhere near 1000 domains and has around 500 more under management. I could easily backlink several posts about your sham operation from tens of thousands more by contacting a few friends in the business.

I’ve contacted the NSW department of fair trading about lodging a complaint and the person I spoke to was concerned with your warranty conditions and other aspects of your business (implied trading name, fraudulent product description and so on) not complying with statutory requirements. Resolve this quickly or I will lodge a formal complaint.

Darren delivered the finished provisional plans late on Friday. We now have all the details required to put the application for planning permission before council. This will give us permission to build the intended development, but not permission to commence with the development.

Once that is accepted we’ll get on with getting the properly specified and engineered versions completed so we are able to apply for building consent. This will then give us permission to commence the development as specified by engineers and certifiers.

A big thanks to Darren for happily taking on all the numerous small changes we made to his (and our own) ideas along the way. He has been a very easy person to deal with, happy to listen when needed and happy to advise when requested. His wealth of knowledge on all things design and construction made our decision making process much simpler than it may have been.

I need to seek his permission to display the designs, I will post them to the site once I have that.

You can contact Darren by heading over to his website, Wise Drafting.

Now for the dreaded next step – approaching council for planning permission.

The generator made it overnight from Melbourne which I found quite remarkable considering some of the other purchases that weigh far less and were bought days earlier are still not here despite the freight being 2-3 times that of the generator. My panel lift also made it here, just after the generator.

The 4.2Kva “Silent Inverter Generator”
We bought the generator from this Ebay seller and would recommend anyone looking for similar to keep an eye on the auctions this seller has. His items do sell for a little more than through other Ebay stores, but his freight is so cheap I recommend you weigh up the freight from each seller before you settle on your bid.

First impressions on the generator are excellent. Solid packaging and the quality of the unit far surpasses my expectations. Nicely finished, details paid attention to and a manual with a better grasp of English than most, like, you know, teenagers. Filled the sump as instructed and exact volume stated was required, 1.1L of oil.

Connected battery as instructed, splashed some fuel and used the remote starter to fire it up. This is one nifty feature and the manual states up to 50 metres effective range and I got about 20 through solid brick wall so I was happy with that. It’s not “silent” but you could happily hold a conversation without having to yell over the top of the noise.

Being new I didn’t want to stress it too much but it did fire up the Makita circular saw (1800W) without any real increase in revs. With voltage control regulators, it should be able to power any of the tools I have now without raising a sweat and without using a hell of a lot of fuel.

The “I-force Panel Lifter”
Purchased this item new from this Ebay seller.

Again, I was very surprised at the quality of the item fearing it may have been a cheaper version than those available in the store despite being very much an identical product. It folds down to something you could store under a bed, not that you would, but now you know how little space it needs.

This item also has a well written manual with useful instructions and I had it out of the box and together in under 5 minutes. Just as important, I had it disassembled and back in the box in the same time frame.

Yep, another one as quick as the other one.

A nice bargain with some scaffolding, $300 cheaper than retail and this one has a few added bits and pieces such as work shelves with it as well.

Miniskaff 918 never used off Ebay – $600
Sprint Auto Parts for 16 litres of cheap Castrol oil for use as concrete mold release – $48.70

Tally now stands at $218 881.00

Our Ebay spree has come to a handy little total. Price below are including freight.
Concrete vibrator, whipper snipper style – $305
Panel lifter (for plasterboard sheeting) – $236.90
4.2kVa (3kw output) sine wave generator – $755.25

There are another couple of items we’re waiting to come to a close before bidding on and I’ll update those and give a brief first impression of the items when they land here.

Total spend is now at $218 232.30

Having spent most of yesterday with hire companies looking at what stuff costs to hire for the period of time we are likely to need it (which means doubling the estimated time), last night I turned to Ebay to check out some prices.

A word of warning – most of the cheap tools on Ebay are no name and cheap Chinese imports, but if some of these things can last us for the build before they fall apart, that will do us just fine. Last night we picked up a brand new whipper-snipper styled concrete vibrator with 1 years warranty for less than it would cost for 1 weeks hire. We had figured on needing one of these for 8 weeks, so this was a bargain. If it makes it out the other side of the build we can flog it via ebay with any recoup on the original price a nice bonus.

I’ve got some bids in on 3kW sine wave inverter generators right now, again cheap Chinese imports but again with a 12 month warranty. These have been selling for 20% of the price of brand name generators, and I can’t find a bad word about them in google other than “they are Chinese imports”.

A panel lift for ceiling plasterboard is going for less than half of the price I can buy one for locally, and this is an IDENTICAL item. It’s actually less than the cost of hiring one for 48 hours, so again we’ll use it then flog it and any money back is a nice bonus.

Finally some words of wisdom when purchasing anything via Ebay:

1. Know what the product is worth, and how much it is worth to you.

2. Understand how much postage will cost you.

3. Set your price limit taking into account cost + postage vs buying the product from a local shop.

4. Check the seller’s reputation and if there are any negative comments read why and decide if you are prepared to risk the same issue yourself.

5. Enter your set price limit as your MAXIMUM automatic bid. For those not aware of how the automatic bids work lets take a simple example.

The tool you want you are prepared to pay $100 for. You enter $100. Your first bid appears as the minimum required for you to lead the bidding, lets say it was the first bid and it is set at $0.99 (as many auctions start). 3 days later with 3 minutes to go and 15 bids made in total you are leading with a bid of $42.50

Along comes Joe Schmuk who waits until the last minute to enter a bid. He enters $50 and your auto bid counters with $52.50. Joe can play the game right up to $100 and not beat your auto bid, so you secure the tool as the earliest maximum bid will win the auction if there is a tie. If he gives up at $72.50 the tool is yours for only $75.

To explain how there would be a “tie” – unlikely yes, but lets say you both enter a max bid of $100 but are beaten by a bid of $105 that is later retracted. You would win since you placed the first maximum bid of $100.

I have learnt to always enter what I would be prepared to pay. The auto bid system is there to help you win the item at the lowest price without giving away what you are prepared to pay.

6. Pay promptly after winning the auction, and use Paypal where possible as it offers you some security with buyer protection.

7. Don’t forget to leave feedback about your experience. If the experience sucked, rate it poorly and explain why to warn other buyers. If it was good, likewise let your fellow consumer know why you were happy.

If you are completely new to Ebay then I recommend you watch the closing few minutes of some auctions as this is when all the action really starts to happen.  Refresh the screen often and you’ll see the bids begin to mount up as time runs out.

When you are experienced with it, you’ll find you can drop your bid in the closing few seconds, and providing it is realistic, win that item in many cases for less than your maximum bid.

For easy uploads when we’re marooned in the middle of nowhere with inverter powered electronics I’ve opened a Flickr account to store the photos to.

Click here for our Flickr photostream. If you sort the photos by sets I’m trying my best to keep each new happening as its’ own set of photos.

Title says it all I guess.

I cut and welded the steel for our prototype last night, deciding to tack rather than weld in full which turned out to be a brainwave. I was originally allowing for half an hour a divider, with 8 welding rods being needed for each. It turns out by tacking the mold at the base and welding the steel not covered by concrete provided a quicker, neater and far less intricate solution to the problem. End result is steel was cut and welded in about 5 minutes.

The wife and I made up an MDF mold for the whole experiment to sit in, the idea being that would keep the concrete tight against the steel divider as if it were stuck between 2 full size blocks. My greatest concern is with no taper to the shape of the steel divider it may have been stuck by slip force. This turn out to be partly true and I now have an idea for a prototype divider removal tool 🙂

We also took the opportunity to try a wet mix. One half was tamped as each shovel of concrete went in, the other was simply slumped into the mold and let to set. Preliminary results tell us we need to tamp the mix to ensure a clean and consistent gap free finish.

Turned out to be a great day in terms of outcomes and productivity, we also managed to get several hundred redgum seedlings potted on to grow tubes and another several hundred seeds sown for the next lot of seedlings. With some luck we’ll have 2-3 thousand seedlings ready to plant by Christmas.

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.

Steel for the proof of concept molds for the poured earth system from AJ Stock cost us $36-

MDF board and 2 bags of premix concrete for the same proof of concept set up from Stratco cost us $21.20

A 100 metre fibreglass measuring tape and skeleton caulking gun from Trade Tools Direct cost us $87.90

This brings the total spend to date to $216 935.20