Shavingcrete

[All Darc]

The foam must be pumped into the bottom of the tank, otherwise it will not mix right.

That's why Gaia mixer have a tube that make the foam scape very close to the blades, in the bottom of the mixer.

Originally Posted by Xist

Well, that would cut down the glare...

Something like this?

What is the cost, since it reqquires a lot of thickners and acclerators,

http://www.naturalbuildingblog.com/s...ical-concrete/

If it uses flyashes (only ???) as thickners, it may be quite ecologic.

Originally Posted by freebeard

[freebeard]

Pozzolan is the 'secret ingredient' in Roman cement. It turns out they knew and used this (according to the source) in the construction of dams in the 1930s. Roman cement is also known as hydraulic cement. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pozzolan&t=ffsb&ia=web

The largest unreinforced dome in the world is still the Pantheon.

Even with spacecrete process a box-like shoe on the end of an arm could replace all the hand labor It could have vibrating finger built right into it at the trailing edge of the shoe.

In the video at 36:00 he talks about welded tuff, which is a rock that that is form from ash that precipitates out of the atmosphere while it is still white hot. This suggests that a 3D printer head that is an oxy-acetelyne torch that is fed powdered ash. It is really hard stuff.

[Xist]

So, I went out back to do yard work, and Mom had a glass jar on the patio for some reason.

Not pictured: A glass jar filled with mud.

I wanted the gallon pitcher with markings on it. I have a graduated cylinder with far more markings, but I am not sure that it holds as much as the jar. Can we see how everything separates out? I do not have any idea. Are there more than two layers? I doubt that I do not see additional layers because it is all the same stuff, but Arizona is a weird place. Choosing a [not-entirely-clean] translucent pitcher might have messed up everything.

Well, how much did the dirt expand?

[nervous laugh]

So, I got two quick shovel fulls (not forcing the shovel into the dirt, that is way too much time and effort), dropped it into the pitcher, added water until it started overflowing, broke another leg off of Mom's tomato basket, twisted it into a spiral, and used my cordless screwdriver to mix up the mud.

I could not find my shavingcrete mixer.

So, how high was the dirt before I mixed it?

On average?

It was two big lumps.

I resized the image so that it was 1,000 pixels from the two and three quart marks. The water line is 243 pixels above the middle of the 2 Qts line and the organic matter line was 163 pixels above the 3 Qts line.

2.243 quarts of mud
3.163 - 2.243 = 0.92 quarts of dirty water.

So, I should probably go back with a dish pan, shovel an approximately equivalent amount of dirt, break it up, shovel it into the clean and dry pitcher to the two-quart line, add two quarts of water, mix, and give some privacy.

Did I ruin everything? I think that we know enough. I tried to get approximately equal portions dirt and water. I ended up with 71% mud and 29% dirty water. Maybe I was off 42%, but dirt is not supposed to expand when it turns to mud?

Sponges expand when they absorb water! What am I missing?

[freebeard]

Dirt is a mix of clay, silt and sand with organic material. The proportions probably matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansive_clay

Originally Posted by DDG

Expansive Soil Problems and Solutions
http://www.foundation-repair-guide.c...sive-soil.html
Getting Control of Expansive Soil. Expansive soil, also called shrink-swell soil, is a very common cause of foundation problems. Depending upon the supply of moisture in the ground, shrink-swell soils will experience changes in volume of up to thirty percent or more.

[Xist]

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers about half of the homes in the United States are built on expansive soils. (Soils prone to large volume changes, i.e., shrinking and swelling, resulting from changes in water content.) And of these homes, nearly half suffer some damage because of the soil. Each year in the U.S., expansive soils are responsible for more damage to homes than are floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined!

The geology and semi-arid climate of the arid Southwest provide near ideal conditions for the formation of expansive and collapsing soils. And, unfortunately, problem soils are found throughout Arizona, from Yuma in the southwest to the northeast corner of the Colorado Plateau.

https://azgs.arizona.edu/center-natu.../problem-soils

So, Arizona soil is garbage.
This is known.

I was able to look at Mom's house here:
https://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/...oilSurvey.aspx

It did not have any soil data, though.

The King of Random had an amazingly lame video about making his own clay. It was a ridiculous amount of work. The best part was a clip he showed of Primitive Technology. Unfortunately, the Casper ad was far longer.

1. He dug some mud from under a bridge.
2. He mixed it with water in a bucket, allowed it to settle, and poured off the dirty water into a second bucket, and discarded the gravel, etc.
3. He poured the dirty water through a strainer, cleaned the strainer, and poured it through again.
4. He poured it back and forth between two glasses to collect the fine sand, which clung to the sides.
5. He allowed it to sit and collected the dirty water from the top, discarding it.
6. He doubled up a towel and poured the mud into it, tied it into a ball, and allowed it to drain for an hour. He also squeezed the towel for a while, sacrificing some clay.
7. He squeezed it between paper towels and finally got clay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGuYNwp1OUY

So, if my soil is garbage, it is the fault of the clay, right? Well, any King of Random can separate the undesirable clay, and then replace it with good clay?

Where would I purchase good clay? I can find pottery clay on-line, but I do not have any idea what type I would want, but what difference would it make?

Compressed earth blocks are a labor-intensive process and so is separating the clay from dirt. I then buy clay and work it in to make bricks?

Let me get right on that...

[oil pan 4]

The soil around here sucks water too.
It's almost hydrofobic when it does absorb water the roads crumble.

The next slab I pour will be 5 or 6 inches thick, have footers, use steel and fiber reenforcement and use fly ash to reduce permability.

[Xist]

I saw one build where they put down a thick layer of foam board before pouring concrete and I know people often use foam board on the outside of basements.

Since the force is distributed, the foam is not compressed significantly? I have seen pictures of conexes buried a foot or two underground and the top and sides started bending in.

When I was looking at conexes I wondered how terribly hard it would be to make foam insulation boards that fit a conex.

How much foam would it take to protect a steel container from dirt?

[freebeard]

If a conex container is buried in expansive soil, I'd imagine the forces on the side walls would be tremendous, like being squeezed in a vice. The top not so much?

Potters have been mass-producing clay for millennia. I remember the big mixers from when I took ceramics in college. They fine tune the mixture for various uses.

That why I think varied pozzolan vs fly-ash in aircrete should be tested.

For building on expansive soils how about pilings. I like the Foundation Frame. It's a hybrid pier block/piling.


https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b5/c7...5056ed12ac.png

How much foam would it take to protect a steel container dome from dirt?

Fixed it for you. Slabs of foam will resist compression much more than bending.

[Xist]

That reminds me somewhat of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgMpaSZZK-g

You drive the legs into the ground?

I just completed the second quiz of the month. We were only assigned one chapter. I watched the lectures, made notes on the chapter, and several of the thirty-six questions seemed completely independent of both.

So, where were we supposed to learn them?

There was one specific question that I do not remember from this class, but from a professor at Arizona State in 2013.

Good thing I remembered that one thing.

I only earned an 89.3%, which is disappointing when the point of taking the class is to get into grad school, where anything below an A is simply inadequate.

[freebeard]

Using a big ol' jackhammer.

it's patented technology but you could roll you own for personal use.

The deck model picture supports 2500lb. There's another model with a steel pocket for a 4x4 post that supports 5000lb each. There's a plug in the bottom so it doesn't fill with dirt and a cap on the top so it doesn't fill with water.

The angled pins would resist uplift as well as supporting the load.