[Cob] Ian & building codes

[Mary Lou McFarland]

Dear Ian,   About a bizillion years ago I worked for the Dept. of 
Transportation.  It was great!!  It put me in a position to learn so much.  
I was fortunate that I was bounced around quite a few different projects and 
one of them was a big five bridge project.  Before the pour,  samples of the 
mix to be used were poured into beams, then allowed to set up.  Then they're 
soaked in water and broken to see exactly how much stress they could take.  
Granted, we wouldn't want to soak a cob brick in water, but it would be 
really cool if  cob builders from all over could send their sample bricks to 
a common inspection center .  If we could catalog where the clay came from, 
the recipe used and it's breaking point then we could start amassing some 
critical information necessary for creating code.  Are there any engineering 
students out there that have access to beam breaking equipment and  would 
like some great help on obtaining data for a paper?  I think this could be a 
really interesting project if we could find a way to get it organized.

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