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After finishing the bond beam we were ready to move on into new territory. Janis was playing in the mud,
We set up to make adobe and start the tire in-fill process. Once a tire wall is done you need to fill in all those spaces where the
tires meet. They are like V's on their side with the wide end open towards the room interior. You fill them with adobe until the mud is level with the outer most portions of the tires. This process
takes multiple coats of adobe. The adobe is made from the earth around the house mixed with a portion of sand and cut straw. The first task was to build an adobe mixer. The mixer looks like
a flat bottom boat. We made it from two pieces of 5/8 plywood and 4 2x4's. We are mixing up a load of adobe in the picture below. In the right hand side of the picture is our screen. Its a 4
foot by 8 foot 3/4 inch screen from an old rock crusher. When we finish the in-fill and start plastering the walls we will add a 1/4 screen over the 3/4 inch one to screen out a much finer mix of dirt.
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It takes a lot of water to do adobe. Until we get the spring piped up to the house, a major task in itself, we are hauling water from town and storing it in a tank above the house. Adobe making
means there are a lot more water trips to keep the tank full. In the picture below, you can see the first layer of adobe being applied to the west cistern. The cans are stuck into the adobe to reduce
the amount of adobe needed to fill up the spaces.
It takes alot of adobe to fill in all the U's. You get these huge cracks when the adobe dries if you do your layers to thick. We were using a 1 to 3 mix of sand to dirt. The straw was readily
available in bale form but nobody had it already cut up. I bought a cheap leaf blower/vacuum that shreds when you use the vacuum side of the machine. I hate the things but it does a great
job on the straw. We will run it through twice to get smaller pieces when we get to the plaster phase.
Below is a picture of the second layer going on. You can see the feet for the trusses that are embedded in the bond beam above.
We are starting on our third in-fill layer and will have pictures shortly. It looks like 4 layers will bring us our even with the tires for all but a few areas. After that we will switch to a 1/4 inch
screen to filter the dirt, use plaster sand, and chop the straw to a smaller size.
Stay tuned!
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