Natural building materials: straw, sticks, clay or a mix You may find cob cottages particularly cute, but taste isn't reason enough to choose one natural building material over another. Like more manufactured products, different earth materials all have different uses: straw bale is a great insulator, cob is a nice thermal sink as well as one of the easiest materials to sculpt if you're looking for lots of curves in your structure. "There's a dozen ways you can build a wall using pretty much the same materials: clay soils, straw, sand, sticks", explains natural building expert Michael G. Smith, "and each of those has its own particular sets of attributes as far as wall thickness, thermal properties, sculptural properties, speed, materials that they require, etcetera, etcetera so you might make different decisions based on your site, based on who you are, what you need as to which materials to use, but even within the same building different parts of the building need to do different tasks."
Learn Where Wind Comes From | Activity If your child is curious about how weather works, this experiment is a great place to start. This easy-to-create demonstration shows exactly how upward movement of warm air creates wind. What You Need: Paper Pencil Thumbtack Scissors Thread Clothing hanger A heat source (sun-heated pan, lit table lamp, dryer, etc.) What You Do: Have your child draw a spiral shape on a piece of paper and cut it out. Cob St-Ambroise | Constructions Écologiques The Internet and Human Evolution towards a Noosphere | robbdavis.com A few day's ago I posted an update about being in chinatown. It wasn't what I would consider an engaging post. It was created entirely on my cell phone, posted to the internet from my cell phone and, more than anything, it was a slice of my real time experience in that moment. That aspect of the post is, to me, extraordinarily interesting. Revolutionary is a word that's used much to often when talking about technology so I'm not going to use it here. I do believe, though, that the ability to access other people's real time experiences, as mundane as they might be individually, is evolutionary. We are living in an era where, for the first time ever, human beings have access to the knowledge from all the cultures of the world. My point is that homo sapien's continued development of connective technologies has created, in a very short time, the structures for a new evolutionary stage.
How to make a backyard mud oven. Cheap, fun, and makes a professional qualtity pizza! Making a backyard mud or clay oven is a great family project, and once completed, you will be able to make fantastic hearth breads, and professional quality pizza. A mud oven is a wood burning oven, which used the residual heat from the firing to cook with. A basic backyard oven can be made for next to nothing, and will be a very satisfying project for the whole family. There will be lots of mud and squishing and stuff; and kids will definitely enjoy the process. A cob or clay oven is vastly superior to your conventional oven for pizzas and bread. The steps as follows are a pretty basic guide, and if you get inspired, you can visit the links at the bottom the page for more information. Basically all you need is sand, clay, and straw. You are going to make the oven using to different mixtures of "mud". To start, make a fire proof platform for your oven. The mixing of this is both the fun part, and also the hard part. Now for the hearth floor. Presto chango…you've made an oven! Enjoy!
Building with Cob The RIC Good Wood Guide Sculpt your own House by Ianto Evans - reprinted from Permaculture International Journal, March '95 Contents at a Glance.. Introduction Standing Strong in the Rain Earthquakes? Elegant Climate Control How Fast can You Build? Materials A Cob Cottage for $500 Why Bother? Introduction Cob is one of many methods for building with raw earth. Working with cob is a sensory and aesthetic experience similar to sculpting with clay. With the soaring price of timber and increasing interest in natural and environmentally-safe building practices, cob is enjoying a renaissance. Once the basics are understood, cob building is amazingly simple. Cob workshops should include other information that you will need: site-selection, foundations, windows and doors, attachment of wood and other materials, detail work and finishing. Standing Strong in the Rain Cob is highly resistant to weathering. Earthquakes? Elegant Climate Control How Fast can You Build? Materials A Cob Cottage for $500 Why Bother?
Mesurer un taux d'argile pour des enduits terre Le bon taux !! Torchis, pisé, enduits terre et chaux.... Les anciens se servaient de la terre, matériau à moindre coût qui les environnaient, pour construire, bâtir et isoler. Ses qualités d'inertie thermique sont indéniables surtout associées à des fibres. L'idéal pour se servir de la terre comme liant, c'est qu'elle soit argileuse à 30%. Pour être au clair avec le taux d'argile dans la la terre dont on dispose, rien de tel qu'un test simple. Le test Le sable se dépose tout doucement au fond du pot assez rapidement. Utilisation A environ 30%, elle est pratiquement "prête à l'emploi" à titre de liant. Lorsque le taux d'argile est trop faible (inférieur à 10%), la terre n'a plus de fonction de liant. Jusqu'à 30%, elle devra être complétée soit par de l'argile soit par de la chaux. Un mélange de deux terres à proportions différentes (l'une à faible taux d'argile, l'autre à fort taux) peut parfaitement se réaliser afin justement d'obtenir le taux idéal.
Latest News: | Cob Cottage Company Cobworks :: Cob and earth house workshops and design I Love Cob! Natural Building Colloquium The History of Cob MICHAEL SMITH Ancient Roots Because of its versatility and widespread availability, earth has been used as a construction material on every continent and in every age. It is one of the oldest building materials on the planet; the first freestanding human dwellings may have been built of sod or wattle-and-daub. About 10,000 years ago, the residents of Jericho were using oval, hand formed, sun dried bricks (adobes), which were probably a refinement of earlier cob. Earth construction takes many forms, including adobe, sod, rammed earth, straw-clay, and wattle-and-daub. Exactly when and how cob building first arose in England remains uncertain, but it is known that cob houses were being built there by the 13th Century. However it happened, cob houses became the norm in many parts of Britain by the 15th Century, and stayed that way until industrialization and cheap transportation made brick popular in the late 1800s. The English Cob Revival The Development of "Oregon Cob"