|
G ‘day Chris Each to his own mate, I do not have a problem with the dip
zee bales method al a Tom Rijven as such. If a builder or owner builder likes the method
then use it as with all methods in straw bale buildings. Tom the Magic Rijven demonstrated
the method on one of our walls in Ganmain. Tom had to dip the things then carry them up
a ladder scaffold as he was building the gable end. Tom being Tom did a grand job but it was
difficult to get them straight and we could not brush cut them either. MLW just loves brush cutting bales into shape! Every building is the last one that she is
going to brush cut! No my problems with the dip zee bales method are as follows: 1. Too slow. 2. The bales once in
place do not take water from the side on as rain tends to sheet off the bales
if you put the cut edge to the outside of the wall and the furry side to the inside. So why go to the bother of dipping them when
it is a whole lot easier and much faster to spray the first two cost of earthen
or lime render on the walls. Much, much
quicker and time is money in the building game. 3. You get very dirty
and professional builders would just laugh at the method no way would they take
to this method. 4. Pre-compression is
a must for those who are in the business of earning their daily crust from
building in straw bale. Without
pre-compression in all methods of SB you do not rest easy at night! That I promise you. You see all bales ain’t the same
mate. Pre-compression takes the guess
work out of building in straw bale and means you can get the roof on immediately
the pre-compression is done. I always
build a test wall out of the bales supplied for the job and do some test runs
to see how much compression I can get before I build. This goes for in-fill and load bearing
methods. You could possibly still
pre-compress dipped bales once in place.
The method that Bill and Athena are using and we are adopting a very similar methods would allow one to pre-compress
dipped bales but it would b e a messy job. This is the way the Uni of Western Sydney have recently
tested wider top plates and bottom plates.
It works a treat and I will post the photos to the SB r-Us yahoo list
for those interested. It is by the far
the best method that I have used and I am very happy with it for load bearing
buildings using any size of bales. 5. All this talk of the
render bearing the load as against the straw bales is too me practically hard
to fathom. My strong belief is that the straw
bale AND the render act in symbiosis and spread the load across the full width
of the wall. Creep happens on all
renders as far as I know on all types of surface. I can show you photos of the render on some
walls not in touch with the top plates in some case up to 10mm which means that
the straw bales are holding the roof assembly up not the renders. Dipped or not the render eventually creeps
downwards and a gap appears at the junction of the top plate and the bale. Finally I do not like cement period from an environmental
point of view, I prefer earthen renders but for professional work I am using
three coats of lime directly on to the bales with zero netting, yes I know that
lime has almost as much embodied energy etc. as cement but it works well on
straw bales is easy to apply and handles moisture very well, as opposed to
cement. I would not fancy dipping zee
bales in zee lime mate! Kind regards The Straw Wolf http://strawbale.archinet.com.au 61 2 6927 6027 -- |