Day 20 - Oliver Goddard

After an evening of contingency design, Emma has suggested if we cannot source timber, then we should look closely at the local materials that we can easily obtain.  Emma highlighted that we have plenty of sand onsite, plenty of clay extracted from our foundations and we can easily obtain used car tyres.  As a result, she suggested that we should look into using Earthship construction techniques to begin creating load-bearing walls.  This would allow us to begin the roof construction instantly after receiving our delayed timbers.

We revised details, sourced a 12lb sledgehammer and borrowed some tyres from the tyre-climb apparatus, mixed clay with sand and began ramming our first tyre.  After an hour of hard fun, the two of us had completed our first rammed earth tyre and began discussing our thoughts.  

Using recycled tyres, local and natural materials, clearing excessive aggregate left over from the school extension, involving the children in the construction process and educating how re-useing resources can provide beautiful construction without ecological disruption are the key positives that we summarised from using this type of construction.  However, our lack of experience with this construction has caused concern with group members who feel reluctant to pursue this approach especially as it labour intensive and temperature and humidity levels are still rising. 

We visited local precedents of natural building techniques who encouraged us to pursue the tyre construction but highlighted the problems of clay and lime rendering with Belize’s climatic conditions.  The local process is more time consuming than that of our previous experiences, which raised great concern with the limited time remaining.

After receiving news from Mayan Lumber that they were receiving pine heartwood poles on Monday, we decided to abandon the use of rammed earth tyre construction, use the pine posts for the uprights and redesign the roof and climbing frames to deal with the 3m poles instead of the 6m sawn timbers that we had used in our initial design.     

Experiment with rammed earth tyres