A celebration of dodgy formwork

Dodgy west-wall form-work, with dodgy annotations in crayon

This post is a celebration of just how temporary form-work can be when you are working with something as flexible as Light Earth.  I'd like to see the sort of engineering you'd need to do these awkward bits of wall in rammed earth!

The photo above shows bits of wall that have frames made of wood or metal that we didn't want to damage with screw-holes, because we're not going to render over them.  When I shoved the straw-mud mix in the column on the left, TJ held the laminex boards in place with his hands.  Then we tied it on with bailing twine for an hour while it dried.  Yes, bailing-twine.  Is there anything it can't do?

New!  Sliding formwork technique!

This is a new technique I developed last weekend.  I wish I'd figured this out before I did the tops of all those other wall panels!  There's always a gap at the top of every wall that you have to fill with mud free-hand, because you can't put formwork all the way to the top (think about it). Usually I shove mud into the gap and try to smooth it down with a pastering tool called a float.  It always looks awful, and I disguise it with render later.

This time, I used the float as a bit of hand-held formwork.  As you can see from the very elegant hand-modelling above, I held it in place with one hand, and with the other hand I shoved handfuls of straw in the side.  Then slide it along and continue.  It's the neatest bit of gap filling I've ever done.  Hurt my left arm a lot, though.  Ow, ow ow ow ow.  Ow.

Since it's such a neato new thing, here's another photo showing the sliding formwork technique.

That photo also shows a dodgy wedge-shaped bit of formwork above a window.  We hammered lots of bamboo into the wall to hold the mud in place, but even we were surprised when we took away the formwork and the mud continued to defy gravity!

The tall window in the west wall needed a deep, slightly sloping window surround. The picture below shows how we mocked up the formwork with some old laminex door bits, cut to size and screwed in place against the front panel of formwork..

Window surround formwork

There is a flat piece of ply on the back, covering the whole area.  You shove mud-straw mix in the top, try not to get the ceiling dirty and hope for the best (we did the gap at the top before I developed the sliding formwork technique, above).

Gable, showing repairs and preparation

TJ made two pieces of formwork for the gable. They are only held in at the bottom, leaving a gap at the top to shove straw into.  The photo shows a few pieces of bamboo in place for the next half, but we wedged lots more bamboo into the gap between the ceiling and the frame.  The walls will dry around the bamboo pieces, tying the wall to the frame.  When this half of the gable had dried for an hour, we removed the formwork and flipped it around to do the other side.

And finally, here, have a couple of sugar-gliders in a nesting-box.

Adorable.

Our nest-building really is pretty amateurish compared to theirs. They gather the grey-box leaves in their tails, and bring them into the nest via that little hole you can see in the bottom of the box behind the baffle (the box usually has a lid on the top).


In a few days we will be going to Clydesdale for a whole week!  I can't wait to get started on that north wall.