Cob: commercial clay

[Kyle Towers]

    One possibility might be to buy road base.  It is a mixture of sand,
clay, and gravel and can be had in the Midwest for $2.50/ton.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Amanda Peck" <ap615 at hotmail.com>
To: <coblist at deatech.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 8:16 AM
Subject: Re: Cob: commercial clay


>
> Commercial clay would be @#$!^!!%*!!  expensive.
>
> I thought that the $110 for TONS of good red clay that the local limestone
> quarry had scraped off the area they wanted to quarry next was
> outrageous--even if it broke down to $100 delivery, $10 for the clay.  And
> you'd need a bunch of those to do a cob house.  Up in the Boston area,
seems
> like someone was mentioning recently that the blue clay dug out of some
> building project (The Big Dig?) was free--all you needed was a dump truck.
>
> It's also possible that some of the dug-on-site stuff--just off my
property,
> there's a really nice vein exposed, and everytime anyone (ahem!) gets some
> another tree falls down the hill across the guy's logging road--is almost
> the right sand/gravel/clay consistency so one wouldn't have to do major
> amendments to get good cobbing soil.
>
> But yes, especially for finish layers, people ARE using clay in colors.  I
> want to see the green!  And I keep hearing about putting different colors
in
> as designs.
> ............
> Brad asks:
>
> I gather most people are using clay dug on site.
>
> Has anyone tried using clay from a brickworks or some other industrial
> supplier?
>
> Or are people getting clay from some building excavation site?
>
> I live in suburbia and don't really need to dig a big hole in the ground.
>
> And what about sand?  Do people use bricklayer's sand or something like
> that?
>
>
> Has anyone tried white clay with white sand?
>
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