--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, Ron Richter <ronerichter@...> wrote:
Thanks Bob,
Your scrap and mine as well. We had a barn that collapsed in a strong wind a number of years ago and some of the 2X6 rafter supports have been laying around with nails catching on anyone's clothing that gets near enough. Today they are all chopped up waiting the skirts and final assembly. I am going to have to jury rig a form to level the existing wall as I was using uneven individual blocks. So while that is curing I will get the rest of the forms done and ready to go.
Ron, this is just a suggestion, if you are going to use 2x6's for your 6x8x33 forms and you want to add a skirt to the bottom of them, I would suggest you rip some of them to 2x2 and screw these along the bottom edge of your basic form and screw another also along the top edge of your skirt. The skirt then can later also be used for another form if you should need some extra. Have you looked at my most recent photo post? I show how to take a regular form with a skirt attached to it and just flip it upside down and you have a base form (don't fill the skirt area, just the base, when that block is dry enough to stand alone remove the form and flip it over with the skirt down over the T lock area and your good to go.
I live on the floodplain of a river (the Bitterroot River) and can find no clay here. We have tons of sand and gravel but no clay that I am aware of. So I will need to stick with the paper/cement/sand/lime mix I've been using.
My first test for my stones was only wet paper pulp, sand and cement and it worked just fine, made some really hard stones. The key is "SLUMP" I try to maintain about a three slump, that is where the mixture will stand alone almost to full height (like a cup filled with the mix and then turned upside down on a level surface and once the cup is removed the mixture should almost remain the same, just a little sag)
Because I am working on a work in progress, my forms are 6X8X33 and one towmixer load will fill 8 of them. I think I will make a rather dry batch and see if I can fill 5 of them and remove the first when I get to the 5th. If this won't work then I'll come up with a use for the extra.
Food for a contest entry.
If your existing wall is 6x8x33 blocks, you could make your skirts 11' long, this would produce two sets of forms, you could place your new T lock forms on top of the double 11' long skirts, leaving 6" betwen each finished block, these long forms would be a lot easier to level than individual ones, once you got your existing wall level the following courses would produce your T locks and would take you to the top. In my wall I embedded rebar into the concrete slab below to lock the wall to the slab, if I were going to have to put a top plate on that wall I would have let the rebar spaced ever 4' continue through the wall to a height of 4' and then once the wall was just below 4' I would have welded another 4' piece on to each of them with a 1/2 bolt welded to the top of the last 4' rebar so I could tye my top plate to my slab. I will have a roof over my wall but it is a truss porch and needs no support, the finished wall will have a brick mold on both sides to lock the wall to the ceiling.
Bob
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