Cob: just a couple things I don't understand

[Amanda Peck]

I'm probably not the person to ask, but that won't stop me from trying.

a) you want straw that's strong enough that your boyfriend could--not 
safely, but in terms of strength--swing you around while you were each 
hanging on to an end of a five or seven strand bundle.  And you mush this 
stuff in HARD, so that each succesive lot is well worked in with the 
previous. It seems that the straw in that mix is still straw several hundred 
years later.  Compared to, say, a large freeway bridge (Silliman Evans 
Bridge) in Nashville maybe twenty years ago, that was failing, partly 
because of salt on it in freezing weather.  And it was failing precisely 
because the iron was rusting.

b)You key it in more or less the same way as you do successive pours of 
concrete.  Cob has the advantage that if you let it get too dry, you can wet 
it up.  If it's too wet, it will slump, exactly the same way concrete will 
if you, say, take the forms off way too soon.

c) You want your walls MASSIVE at the bottom. Much thicker than a reinforced 
concrete wall.

d) See the Evans et al book.

Now someone else can tell it even better.


Angy Violet wrote, and I snipped down to nothing.

So, my boyfriend specializes in concrete, and I am trying to explain cob to 
him, and he can't quite compare it to what he knows. He doesn't understand 
why you wouldn't need rebar in the walls!!!!


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