I want the walls to be nice and plumb. This is usually managed with diagonal bracing to position and keep the wall where you want it. To add a bit of finer control over the wall, you will often see builders use a turnbuckle. These allow the builder to make fine adjustments. Often these are needed both to plumb the formwork and to help brace against concrete blowouts, etc. so they need to be big strong expensive things… Sometimes you see whole systems of bracing…
In the system on the right, the yellow parts are threaded and can be turned to adjust plumb. They also provide a nice working scaffold for the second half of the wall, brace against the concrete, etc. These cost hundreds of dollars each, but would be totally worth it if I were an ICF contractor.
In my design, the steel studs are considerably lighter, so they will be much easier to push into plumb. The walls are curved and the studs will be tied together with the metal lath, so they should be able to resist the shotcrete on their own. This frees me to go for a much lighter design.
I got some inspiration from this example (on the left). You can see that the bottom is a piece of angle iron screwed into a 2×4. They welded a nut to the angle iron with a threaded rod connected to another bracket that they attach to the vertical form work… The end of the threaded rod is cut to take a screw driver. Adjustments turn the threaded rod and make it move thru the welded nut. This allows for fine adjustments on the overall lengths of each support. Adjusting the length provides the fine tuning needed to plumb the wall. I can buy a turnbuckle like this from an ICF distributor. The problem is this little piece of hardware costs $16.99, plus shipping, and I would need a bunch of them.
So I made my own.
I used my new welder to weld the nuts to the angle iron (less than a minute). Then I used my grinder to make a hex end on each threaded bolt so that I can drive them with a socket on my drill (just over a minute). I ended up making 3 different sizes, 1/4, 5/16ths and 3/8ths, just so I could compare them.
I could get 1/4 inch locknuts from Home Depot, but they don’t carry them in the other two sizes. I could probably order them for 5/16th and 3/8ths, but I ended up just tightening two regular nuts together for a similar effect. The rest is just a 6 inch bolt in one direction (for the length adjustment) and a 3 inch bolt in the other (for a pivot), plus washers… I will screw the second wood block into the steel studs and the angle iron gets attached to an 8 ft piece of 2×2 wood which is staked into the ground.
Total cost is less than 2 dollars each for the big one and almost down to a dollar for the 1/4 inch version. I would need to make about 40 of these before the savings would pay off my welder and related tools. The 8′ piece of 2×2 costs and additional $1.50 each.
Here is a close up on the welded nut and ground hex end.
Tomorrow, I will try these out before making any more.
Serenity Now
Writing this blog definitely makes me think a bit more about how things are going. I am a bit disappointed that I don’t have much progress… But it feels a bit worse because I don’t have a good title for this week (or a timelapse video). Is that strange?
I guess the actual lack of progress will feel much worse when winter arrives. I had planned on working all the long weekends; but, like the May Two-Four weekend, the 4th of July weekend didn’t give much progress toward the final construction. But it did let me recover from my cold and have some good family time.
These are some over detailed explanations for those who want to understand the struggle. If you just want the short version of the updates, you can “like” Home in the Earth on Facebook.
No Steel for You
I had planned on getting a delivery of steel studs last Wednesday. These are not the crappy kind you get in fixed lengths from Home Depot… These are special MarinoWare 20 gauge studs, specially cut for my order, ranging from 9 ft to 26 ft long. Previously, my work week had been minimized because the order didn’t go thru properly. This time, I think the problem was more related to too many people taking advantage of the 4th of July long weekend and too many construction crews not ordering steel. There wasn’t enough of a shipment coming to my distributor to justify sending a truck long enough to carry my 26 ft studs. No problem for them, they would just send it after the holiday… Messed up my plans though, and it would have been a beautiful work weekend too.
No Scaffold for You
But I still planned on getting a scaffold delivery on Wednesday. This is not your regular home depot scaffold either. This is a proper 26 ft tall made-in-the-USA scaffold tower with lots of extra stability. I needed it to erect those 26 ft tall steel studs that form the central tower. They had shipped it out the previous week and emailed me a link to a tracking website (for some shipping company I had never heard of). I had checked the link a few times but the website wasn’t working. By Wednesday morning, after the steel order failed, and the tracking link still wasn’t working, I phoned the shipping company directly (SAIA?) I gave them my tracking number and they told me they had no record of that shipment. I called the scaffold company and asked them about it. The email they had sent me on the day it shipped had all the correct information, what she now read me from her computer had all the wrong information, including my address and a shipping date 3 days later and a different shipping company (with a different tracking number). She looked up the tracking number for me, but it was also a dud, and so she had no idea where the package was. After all those mistakes, I asked her to please confirm what she shipped. But she wouldn’t read me what it said on her version of the Bill of Lading, she just said she was sure they had shipped the right thing and she would call me back (she did about 8 hours later, long after I had figured it out). The third company involved was some sort of middle-man logistics and customer service company that looks after emailing out that original tracking number. It seems that the SAIA company couldn’t get their trucks in a row, so after 3 days of sitting on a dock, they switched me to FedEx with a new tracking number. The guy looked it up while we were on the phone and said, “I am sorry sir, but your package was supposed to be delivered today, but it is in Mississippi instead. Maybe Tuesday”. Wow.
I was just about to cancel my brother in law who would soon be headed over to help me when I decided to check the new tracking number myself. It turns out that the guy on the phone doesn’t know his state codes. It didn’t say Mississippi, it said “MI”, which is for Michigan. The package had been in town since first thing that morning and would be delivered that day. I called FedEx, they confirmed that a driver would call me to confirm what time he would deliver because they wouldn’t leave it unless I was there.
My brother-in-law, John, arrived, and we packed up my car. My younger son was also going to come with us. We were less than 5 minutes down the road (of the 55 minute trip) when FedEx called to book a time for the following day… I guess they didn’t have enough drivers on that week due to the holiday. So we turned around and went home.
Scaffold
Thursday, I went out to meet the FedEx driver and get my 1200 lbs of scaffold. He got there early, so I found an 18 wheeler waiting for me in the circle at the bottom of my driveway. As I guessed, he had no way to unload the truck. Since I had no heavy equipment on site, I had the fun of unloading the truck piece by piece (the FedEx guy handed the pieces down to me) into my trailer. I used the trailer to make the trip up my driveway and then unloaded it into my shipping container for use next week. It was tempting, but wouldn’t be wise to try and assemble something like this by myself.
Instead, I focused on prepping the spot where the tower would go. I had designed things so that the scaffold tower would sit (nice and firmly) on the circular footing. Even the 30 inch outriggers will fit on the footing, although I will have to leave openings thru the metal lath. I confirmed this by putting one of the diagonal braces across, but it was a bit close to the edge. I thought it would be best to fill in the center of the footing with dirt so that there wouldn’t be any problems if it shifted a few inches.
Transit
I had bought a David White builders transit on Craig’s List Tuesday evening. I bought it from an old guy (at least in his 60’s) and so I assumed it was his. I asked about some of the adjustment knobs and he said he didn’t know how to use it because it had been his grandfathers. I asked how old it was, and he said he didn’t know, but his grandfather retired from being a surveyor for the city of Detroit in the 1940’s. After I got home, I looked up the serial number and found it was made in 1937. It clearly still works very well (perhaps it has another 77 years in it).
using my “new” transit, I confirmed that at least one of the concrete pads is a bit off, but it will still work out. All my other angles (I had been using my marked center stone) were right on. I had rented a crappy transit from the rental place several times because I didn’t want to buy a new one (too expensive), but this used one will pay its self off in a few uses. Having the right angle is just too important in a home as unusual as mine.
Skid Steer
Well, now it was still pretty early in the afternoon and there wasn’t much left for me to do on site… But I had come prepared with a list of Craig’s List skid steers with in an hour of my property, so it was time for a few hours of driving around. I ended up with a John Deere 260 Skid Steer.
This post is already too long, I put more more details on why I chose a Skid Steer in another post. (or just like us on Facebook to see the post from last week).
Window bucks and welders…
Saturday, I had a couple friends come over to hang out, which was nice, but too rare. We ended up seeing a movie, but first, they helped me cut out some window bucks in preparation for next weeks framing.
I didn’t end up finding the welder that I wanted. I have a couple possible options on Craig’s List to consider, but first I want to chat with my welding-expert uncle. He was busy all weekend, but I will call him tonight. Basically, I want the most economical MIG/MAG setup I can get, I don’t want to spend thousands on an industrial scale rig. That can also be another post.
On Friday, another friend, John H., drove 4 hours (from Canada) to help out for a couple days. Unlike my previous volunteer help, John builds for a living. So, he brought a bunch of tools and experience with him.
For those who want the timelapse video first:
And then the story..
I knew John was a pro when the first thing he did on site was plug a tool box with all his chargers pre-wired up inside it. I had been carrying and plugging in all my chargers separately, so this was revolutionary for me (I have since put my own toolbox full of chargers together).
In fact, John quietly demonstrated a quicker way to do pretty much everything I was doing. The most important thing was simply using an impact driver to get the metal screws into the studs without pre-drilling. Yes, that may sound pretty basic to many of you, but I didn’t realize how much better those were at driving self-tapping screws into steel. I had just assumed that my driver couldn’t handle it because the screws were not designed for the 20 gauge steel. I ended up buying my own impact driver Friday night so I could be much more productive on Saturday.
John H. also brought a radio, which Sherri thought made the construction site much more official. The radio “game” was to hit seek whenever we heard something that we really hated… We ended up listing to a lot of country, which is not my usual genre. Maybe I will get a radio eventually also.
John also had a better hammer drill and reciprocating saw than I did. I guess I was always trying to save money and just ended up wasting time with tools that were not really up to the task. I also ran out of screws on the first day, so the next morning, John wanted me buy the “big” box… I said I didn’t think we needed that many, and John said, “Simon, you are building a house!” Point taken.
However, working with this style of construction (Steel studs, metal lath, strap and shotcrete) was as new to John as anybody, so we were still figuring things out as we worked. For instance, we found that installing the metal strap before the metal lath was much more efficient. It made it much for straight forward for us to plumb the studs in the second direction so we could hang the metal lath without pulling it later. This kept everything flatter.
I am still working out the best methods for attaching the metal lath, but I will write up whatever I figure out at the end. At this point, it looks like the 2.5 lb/sqyd lath is more cooperative than the 3.4 lb/sqyd lath. Making sure the lath is stored in a nice flat spot and no one steps on it is also important (sections of my wall will have a big footprint in them). The lath comes in 27 inch wide strips and we found that it is not worth overlapping. 4 of the strips, edge to edge, adds up to 9 ft, which is the exactly what I needed to cover the walls from bottom to top, we will just need to wire them together later. But the most important thing so far is that you can’t use the lath to pull studs into position… It is good at holding the position of the studs, but if you try to use the lath to pull the studs, you just end up with surface buckles and ripples. It is better to re-adjust the straps to control the studs and then add the lath later.
On Friday, we ended up erecting the 20 ft studs in the play room apse and tying them into the surrounding 9ft studs and door bucks.
Initially assumed we would dig in the footings. When plans changed, I forgot to plan for filling the footings. Doing it with a wheel barrow would have taken a lot of time (or a lot more friends). We tried to hire some high school and college kids so we could keep working on the steel, but none were available right away. Then it occurred to me that the excavator’s biggest piece of equipment was still on site and could probably reach over the steel we had already erected.
We called the excavator first thing Saturday morning and he was available.
It took him a while to get setup, during which time, the sand around my site nearly collapsed and dumped his giant machine into the site. He got himself back onto stable ground and managed to dump the sand in several locations. He says it was about 12000 lbs of sand per scoop and he did about 10 or more scoops in 45 minutes. I would hate to think how long that would have taken with wheelbarrows. John and I spread most of it out right away, and then took a break. The day was half over.
Then we got in a couple window bucks… That took about an hour as we figured out how to attach them to the steel and make everything solid, plumb and level. Then we got in some more metal straps and a bunch more metal lath before the end of the day.
Next week, my sister (Bonnie) will come out to help for a few days.
I want the walls to be nice and plumb. This is usually managed with diagonal bracing to position and keep the wall where you want it. To add a bit of finer control over the wall, you will often see builders use a turnbuckle. These allow the builder to make fine adjustments. Often these are needed both to plumb the formwork and to help brace against concrete blowouts, etc. so they need to be big strong expensive things… Sometimes you see whole systems of bracing…
I got some inspiration from this example (on the left). You can see that the bottom is a piece of angle iron screwed into a 2×4. They welded a nut to the angle iron with a threaded rod connected to another bracket that they attach to the vertical form work… The end of the threaded rod is cut to take a screw driver. Adjustments turn the threaded rod and make it move thru the welded nut. This allows for fine adjustments on the overall lengths of each support. Adjusting the length provides the fine tuning needed to plumb the wall. I can buy a turnbuckle like this from an ICF distributor. The problem is this little piece of hardware costs $16.99, plus shipping, and I would need a bunch of them.
