Sorry, I did not respond sooner. Thank you for all the suggestions. We do not have a driveway that we can draw it out on (Chalk does not work well on dirt. lol) However, we have built a number of different fair and market booths over the years. So we are fairly well versed in the setup we will need inside. Though we did plan on working from the inside out.
My husband has just joined so at some point he will jump in with his ideas for what he was thinking he might try and get opinions from all of you who have worked with the papercrete as we are just getting started.
For the fair booth itself. We can have it up to a maximum of 10 foot wide including any overhangs, which is of course, a bit wider than is legal without a special permit for driving down the road with. So...it will either need a slide out of some type or we will have to get a permit every time we need to move it. Granted, we most likely will not be moving very often, but if we did not need a permit we may do so more often.
It's main use at this point would be for the two weeks of our state fair. Once the booth is there, it will have the wheels removed and be dropped to ground so that we do not need a large handicap ramp. One end of the booth will need to open. Most likely a good sized set of double doors. Which is what we have used in the past. Inside we will end up with shelving, counters, and hanging space of some type along the walls to display our products on and a work area in the back for our equipment and supplies as we will be making our products right there while people shop.
We will have to incorporate tie downs which extend over the roof and down to the base/floor where it can be secured to steel stakes or some such to hold it down in the high winds in the area where our fair is held. Canopies tend to blow away there.
At some point in the future, if this works out...we may try a travel trailer of some type. But first it would be more of a cargo type or unit.
The papercrete geodesic Airstream sounds quite interesting. If all this works, it could prove a very interesting travel trailer, lighter weight and less fuel draining than commercial units. We could all be onto something good here. :>}
Vickey in Alaska
--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, "JayH" <slurryguy@...> wrote:
>
> I had another idea, which might be a hanging slider right over the plate for spaceman to hit out of the park.
>
> What about building two space frame geodesic half domes? One for the front. One for the rear. Then in the middle, build a spaceframe arch to connect them.
>
> Once the spaceframe is in place, you might run some electrical and perhaps some plumbing. Then use spaceman's standard dome construction technique of pouring papercrete triangles to fill in the frame.
>
> Strong. Lightweight. Fairly aerodynamic. Kind of a geodesic Airstream.
>
>
>
>
I'd like to back the discussion up a bit, and ask you to be specific about what exactly your expectations are for the trailer.
Are you expecting to use the trailer primarly as a hauler for your stuff, or are you expecting to use it like a portable vending wagon with a customer sales window? Do you have expectations of sleeping in it like a camper? Do you want the exterior of the trailer to have "outdoor living spaces?" Like.. a retractable awning, or a fold down counter or bench that can be folded up during transport?
How important is it to have insulation in the shell? While I have never been to Alaska, my understanding is that different parts of the state can have radically different climates.
One suggestion I have is to try designing the trailer from the INSIDE OUT. Instead of building a shaped shell, and then struggling to figure out how to fit the stuff inside that you need. Try to figure out what will be inside the trailer, and how it will be used with minimal effort. Then wrap the most appropriate shell around everything. Get all the functional stuff figured out... THEN design the best box/shell to hold it all in a readily usable form.
Perhaps you could experiment with something as simple as Sidewalk Chalk to draw an outline of a possible floorplan on your driveway? Then you could mock up various interior features perhaps with cardboard boxes? That would probably be very useful in helping you determine exactly how much space various things you expect to have inside the trailer for various functions. If you started out by drawing a chalk outline of a standard trailer frame you hope to use, and work from there, you probably can learn a lot really fast. Each major item you plan on putting in the trailer could get mocked up full size with reused cardboard boxes. (It's not like you'd be wasting the boxes anyway. Eventually you'll be pulping up those boxes and turning them into papercrete anyway.) You could mock up the roof of the trailer with a tarp or something to figure out how much headroom you need.
Don't forget to consider weight distribution. You will want to keep things mostly balanced, but with a little more weight toward the tongue than toward the back of the trailer. You don't want the towing vehicle holding UP a large amount of weight on the hitch. However, the worst possible thing is to have the trailer trying to lift the hitch off the ground. That is extremely dangerous because it can dramatically impact the towing vehicle controlability. You also don't want all the heavy stuff on the left or on the right. Otherwise the trailer may lean to one side, and possibly not track properly down the road.
I cannot imagine attempting a specialty project like this without experimenting with a full sized mockup first. Standing inside the space and seeing exactly how everything will be placed and used would be more than worth the time spent. It's a lot cheaper, and a lot faster to find mistakes with sidewalk chalk and cardboard than with a 3/4ths finished project that doesn't have enough space to hold critical items or that doesn't have the most frequently used items organized in manner that is easy and efficient to use.
Something as simple as the size of the door. Will it be big enough to get the stuff that you hope to put inside through the door? You'd be amazed how often extremely smart people make a mistake that fundamental because the problem simply didn't show up on their paper drawings. Who puts things through the door on a paper drawing?
I like the idea of using a chickenwire framework. That makes a lot of sense. That would allow you the ability to make rounded corners and streamline the design. That would make for better fuel economy when hauling it down the road.
For such a small sized project, you probably don't need to use a sprayer. You could apply papercrete by hand ferrocement style, especially if you have two people working together, one on the outside applying papercrete, and one on the inside holding a backer board. (For the first coat anyway.)
I strongly discourage the use of plaster or stucco over the papercrete in this application. With all the vibrations, I doubt that would last. Do you have a local source for old used Billboard tarps? That might make for an excellent inexpensive flexible exterior water tight sheathing that would be easily paintable. You'd probably have to cut it up into "shingles" and glue it on to any tight compound curves, but if the joints overlap an extra amount, it should still be easy to keep everything watertight. Elastomeric paint would be another option, but it would be more prone to leaks if there was some road damage or a crack in the papercrete from all the vibrations. If you used billboard tarp material as a sheathing, it would be more forgiving and have a better chance at keeping the water out, even if there is minor damage.
> --- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, "kjtbeskimo" <vickeym@> wrote:
> >
> > Not quite sure how to explain what we are thinking of. But wondering if anyone had tried making any type of building on wheels that can be hauled down the road.
> >
> > We are thinking of making a booth that can be hauled to craft shows or our state fair.
> >
> > Just wondering if anyone had tried anything of this type in papercrete and what the results were.
> >
> > Vickey in Alaska
> >
>
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