First Rammed Earth Pillar - Pt. 1 - Vlog 41

good morning good morning good morning uh today's a good day we have enough forms to do one column we have concrete we have our air compressor we have our rammer we have everything we need all we got to do is set these forms up make sure they're level and we can begin making rammed earth columns so good stuff here we go there [Applause] good yep and then we get to do the fun thing we get to nail them to the concrete so this is called a ram set you basically take one of these blank 22 cartridges you stick it in there crack it forward take one of the nails and stick it like that stick it down with whatever you're gonna hit pull the trigger and it goes boom and that little nail goes through whatever is in front of it so let's uh try it see what happens yo that was so cool it's even smoking this is my new favorite toy ready we have four sides looks like a rammed earth form to me uh it's very similar to concrete forming so essentially what we have is our little concrete column formed up right here the reason we over built these sides is because these are going to be we're going to reuse these forms for the walls of the house this is a test run on the pillars for our front gate but we're kind of wanting to get an idea of how everything's going to fit together so we went ahead and built the forms as if they were for the walls because we can transport them up there and use them for the walls later and then we're going to do is we're going to stack one more of these up here like that and then that will give us three complete sides of form and then what we'll do is we'll leave this one short like this so that way we can reach the rammer over and ram from right here and then eventually we'll stack the next one up and either do it with a ladder or actually be inside this form which it's not very fun but it is what needs to happen so that's what we're gonna do and then we'll basically pour it in in nine inch lifts and it will compact down to about seven inches so all we got to do is throw this other form in and we can go mix our first set of rammed earth i'm really nervous about that aspect of it because it's been a while since i've done that so we'll see but here we go all right for our mixture big caveat here this is for our mixture because if you're anywhere else or have different materials your mixture will be different for our mixture it is three parts sand to one part gravel so what we're gonna do is we're gonna fill six buckets with sand and dump them in here and two buckets with gravel and dump it in here and then for a 9 to 10 percent cement mixture it will be 52 pounds of cement so it'll be half a bag of portland cement and then to get two percent color we will use one pound of the color material and then oh i need to calculate the add mixture for the whole thing and that will give us two lifts of nine inches which will come back down to seven inches but two lifts of nine inches uh for the first two lifts of ramder so i think depending on what we want to do maybe two percent for the first one or zero percent color for the first one and then two percent for the second one we'll try it out we'll just see kind of what colors we get one bucket so we just fill these in so it's two buckets three buckets thank you jess everyone that's jessica she has an awesome podcast called three shots in i do you should listen but not with your kids no make sure they're in bed or just not there so eventually we'll just mix whole buckets full i mean whole um pair of mixers bowl but we're starting off slow and working our way up to that ah i like it all right that's six buckets ah ah oh yeah it's good and wet just underneath the surface one gravel one gravel for those of you playing at home how many gravels do we need two one of the things you'll notice just under the surface of the rocks it's wet and you'll also notice we have a sprinkler set up to water the rocks basically the rocks will absorb moisture but a lot slower than like sand will so you have to do is keep the rocks pretty moist or damp that way they retain more moisture because if you try to mix it in with really dry rocks what will happen is all the moisture will get sucked into the rocks and it won't allow the cement to cure properly at the right speed so you want the rocks specifically to be nice and damp the sand too but it's it's less important um but you want the rocks really good and damp this is our bucket of rocks bucket two ah and then we'll add the color add the cement and then we'll mix it up and take a look we need to add mixture the add mixture is in with the cement so we also need to add mixture i need to calculate that out and figure out exactly we haven't seen the color yet this is the oh yeah it's the first time we've seen the color yeah this that's literally all this is just a bag of rust look at that honey or something yes ma'am yes dear oh my grandpa good man he was a good man here it is one pound so one pound gets us a two percent color mixture which is light so what we'll do is we'll do half first so it'll be gray but we'll kind of see we'll just do incrementally up so the first four layers will get an idea of what the colors are going to be and what do we need 1.5 fluid ounces which is very small holy moly this does not go down that low so what this is is a hydrophobic admixture basically it will make the walls hydrophobic which will do a couple of things one it makes them waterproof but more importantly it prevents any salts in the water from leaching out over time and staining the walls so that is about right it's just under two so i think we're gonna call that good we'll put that there and we need to do half a bag of portland [Applause] it's about half the bag lovely [Applause] [Music] it's actually probably pretty good i think there was enough moisture in the rocks in the sand i think yeah good man that's probably less than half a gallon of water all right send it yep send it wow go ahead and bring it back and lower it i gotta throw more coloring all right so now that we've rammed it all you can look in there now we're going to hit it with the tamper to finish it up and make a nice clean edge the first list it's i can't turn this thing as much as i thought it just doesn't flow [Music] huh it's kind of i think so why don't we try that and i'll go up on the ladder and direct it there go ahead and mix it for a little bit it's only two lifts but we have rimmed earth yay indeed look at that do you have rounders honey i do oh there's still some in there all right let's go mix another set get it figured out oh that was perfect what was different it's fuller we did a four we did a quadruple load oh and that worked so the first one was a double load this one's a quadruple load good we're probably at almost three feet not quite probably halfway there it's 4 15. oh so we've been ramming for three hours take an hour break we'll plan is if we're not going to do any more so what we do is because the next set will be what's called a cold joint this will shrink just slightly so what we need to do is prep this layer for sitting overnight so we'll have to pack it down really really smooth and then in the morning before we pour the next joint we need to clean out any debris or any loose stuff so basically we'll go in here with a like a little broom and probably a shop back and we'll clean it all out and get it ready to go so that's where we're at all right for this is [Applause] okay that's all in place now we just gotta do the chamfers and dump check this out it's hard to see because there's not a lot of light and i'm in it you see that that's what it looks like this is just the hand tamper [Music] go around the edges flattening it all out but as you can see it's tight all right i am what is this like five feet off the ground probably and i'm standing on top of our first bit of rammed earth the first of many but this is the first and it is mine so we're gonna clean up everything clean up the telehandler make sure we wash it out real good and come back tomorrow vacuum this joint out and finish out the last two feet and we're good so that's it for today thanks for joining our adventure you

Channel: Red Earth Ranch

Views: 27,878

Keywords: rammed earth, rammed earth frame, mixing rammed earth, rammed earth construction, homestead, homestead vlog

Id: ISzL4aEH7EI

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020