Monthly Archives: November 2018

Gunite for the south wall

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Posted on November 2, 2018 by

In this episode, the gunite crew from S.A.M. Gunite Pools comes back to shoot our south wall. They had just finished the roof on the Friday before, so the equipment and materials were already in place. The form work was lath covered rigid XPS insulation over steel stud framework. Easy-peasy… Easy to watch anyway.

The Video

The Forms

We started with a steel stud framework and attached 2 inches of XPS rigid insulation (Pink Board) to that. The window bucks were treated wood, cut to match the curve of the wall. We also had some 4 and 6 inch tube steel in the wall to take loads from the earth covered awing that we will add in a later step. Then we covered the XPS with lath to hold the shotcrete and we were ready to go. You can find more details and pics on the formwork here

This is a pretty easy and robust way to form a wall, and includes built-in continuous insulation already in place from day one. The steel studs also leave a 4 inch deep cavity that I expanded out with some furring strips on the inside so I could fit 5 inches of additional insulation.

The Tools

For more on the difference between gunite and shotcrete, please see this other comparison page.

The Bat’Lath was used a lot in this job to trim down the walls to the correct thickness before troweling. This did create a fair amount of waste, but I am sure it was worth it compared to trying to push around that much concrete.

Carlos using the Batleth on the wall…

The Gallery

A picture is worth a thousand words, but these pics also have captions, so bonus words!