I like the idea of a hybrid technique for your situation, Judith, but I have a suggestion for doing it a little differently.
For any new structure you want to build, I suggest slipforming the lowest portion of any wall. As I understand it, you are simply hauling buckets of wet slurry to fill your sipforms. As long as the walls are reasonbly short, no problem. When the walls get tall, that can turn into some nightmare lifting and hauling of buckets.
Once the walls get high enough that buckets of wet slurry become tortourous... I suggest finishing the top part of the walls using blocks in the more traditional way. It's a lot easier to lift dry blocks up to the top of a wall than buckets of wet slurry. Sure, you'll still need to haul up some buckets of slurry for mortar, but not nearly as many buckets.
For what it's worth, I think this technique might be the least amount of effort when you don't have heavy equipment to do a bunch of heavy lifting for you. It minimizes the hand lifting of the heaviest stuff as much as reasonbly possible. That's always a good thing.
--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, JUDITH WILLIAMS <williams_judith@...> wrote:
>
>
> I LOVED making blocks and I made a lot of them. I have them stacked all over the place. But now I am into slip forming and don't want to lay blocks any more. So I am going to use a hybrid method. I will set up the slip form and pour some slurry into it. Then I will lay the blocks on their ends in the wet slurry so there is room all around them for more slurry that I will pour over them. I think I will wet the blocks well so the new slurry really bonds with them. Anyway, that's what I'm going to do.
>
> But if you do want to make blocks keep in mind that the shorter the block the more curved you can make your wall. I have recently slip formed some curved walls and they came out nice so I am planning to use slip forming as much as possible now and just use blocks where it is necessary.
>
> I do think though that the best thickness for a wall would be about a foot no matter what method you decide on.
>
> Sincerely, Judith
>
> Check out my new Squidoo Lens at http://www.squidoo.com/papercretebyjudith
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