building
 west coast vancouver island |
I've been away in Manila (Philippines) all of March, but using the time to do research and designs. The appearance of the website changed slightly and more contents has been added, including my page on lime and a glossary.
I find that the best way to understand something is to write about it. So creating the lime info page was as much to help me learn as to provide info for others!
I've also been researching and working on technical designs for the rubble trench foundations. I'm still not exactly sure what material the foundation bond beam will be made from. It's a choice between lime-stabilised rammed earth or natural hydraulic lime. I'm hoping I can use rammed earth as it is probably the more environmentally-friendly. I'm going to do a little more research and then create some samples of stabilised rammed earth to test for compressive strength. I'm looking forward to some actual 'hands-on' tasks when I get home.
So far I've found only one company in Vancouver that can supply natural hydraulic lime (NHL), but they are a distributor for another company in California who themselves import the lime from France. Yikes! That's going to have a horribly high carbon footprint. I'll do some more research to see whether I can find a manufacturer in Canada.
My other exciting discovery was sheeps wool insulation! Very natural, very good insulation value, and doesn't seem to be hugely expensive. (Thanks Kane for that suggestion!) It can be supplied from Alberta which is a lot better than lime from France!
During these last few days of the month I've also been working on actual technical drawing and calculations for the workshop. There's a diagram of my proposed rubble trench system on the foundations page and I've been drafting a plan for the post and beam structure. Still working on that but hopefully I'll have something on the support structure page soon!
My big frustration recently was the discovery that this website doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer! My skills as an HTML author are self-taught and I'm still learning how to write the code so that it will look good in IE.
I find that the best way to understand something is to write about it. So creating the lime info page was as much to help me learn as to provide info for others!
I've also been researching and working on technical designs for the rubble trench foundations. I'm still not exactly sure what material the foundation bond beam will be made from. It's a choice between lime-stabilised rammed earth or natural hydraulic lime. I'm hoping I can use rammed earth as it is probably the more environmentally-friendly. I'm going to do a little more research and then create some samples of stabilised rammed earth to test for compressive strength. I'm looking forward to some actual 'hands-on' tasks when I get home.
So far I've found only one company in Vancouver that can supply natural hydraulic lime (NHL), but they are a distributor for another company in California who themselves import the lime from France. Yikes! That's going to have a horribly high carbon footprint. I'll do some more research to see whether I can find a manufacturer in Canada.
My other exciting discovery was sheeps wool insulation! Very natural, very good insulation value, and doesn't seem to be hugely expensive. (Thanks Kane for that suggestion!) It can be supplied from Alberta which is a lot better than lime from France!
During these last few days of the month I've also been working on actual technical drawing and calculations for the workshop. There's a diagram of my proposed rubble trench system on the foundations page and I've been drafting a plan for the post and beam structure. Still working on that but hopefully I'll have something on the support structure page soon!
My big frustration recently was the discovery that this website doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer! My skills as an HTML author are self-taught and I'm still learning how to write the code so that it will look good in IE.