HOW TO BUILD A WALL OUT OF DIRT | RAMMED EARTH

[Music] [Music] good morning good morning guys we're back at it again with another video today special video right a new location ooh fancy fancy so we're at factotum factotum farms which means the jack-of-all-trades which is kind of like a handyman in a sense factotum farms here i bet an hour from where i live and what we're gonna be doing today is we're gonna be going over how to build wall out of dirt otherwise known as rammed earth so we've got our happy tampers mr. Jim mr. green jim project he's always out doing something we've got mr. sombrero Robert Robert we've got Jason the owner of the property here and what have you got going on and mr. ray I'm so sorry coming up from behind the wall right on so what do you have going on out here so we have a lot of fun going on out here as you can see we're trying to just create a structure to protect the old jalopy RV and cover it up and add a little bit more kind of like living space make it a little bit nicer because you guys are going to be growing a lot of crops out here so the we're gonna be or hemin ray they're gonna be working on and completely enclosing the Sun as well as including some rammed earth wall sections which is pretty badass we're gonna go over that in today's video I'm gonna take these forms off we're going to build two more sections over here we're good we're going to be good for that we're going to do it perfect alright let's get started so the first thing that we're working on here is removing all the formwork from the previous wall that they built the previous day so when you're doing rammed earth is you want to take the formwork off for it the following day you don't want to come back a week later and try to take it off you just might not get some good results so you can see the rammed earth wall that they finished off yesterday and look in pretty nice really nice really cool that you can just use dirt to build a wall like this so the first thing that we want to do when we have the former off is that we want to regress the formwork up now there's a lot of different solutions that you can use but definitely one of the cheapest and probably most environmentally friendly ways is actually just using some vegetable oil putting that on the on the plywood and any of the pieces that are gonna be touching the dirt and then just using a palette knife to spread it out nice and evenly across all the plywood so the next step is to reassemble the formwork that we just took off so you can reuse all the same pieces you can reuse that 3/4 inch plywood as much as you want essentially to a point until maybe there's just too many kind of like bends and curves in it and it might be at a good point to replace them but you can reuse them for a lot of this rammed earth former so we're just getting them in place nice and loosely we're just trying to get it to a point where we can put the wailers on but we want to make sure that everything is nice and tight and buttoned up the difference with doing something like rammed earth as opposed to just doing like straight concrete is that there's going to be a lot of outward pressure on the former as we're ramming the earth down so this has to be really tight and really buttoned up now we're installing the wailers so the wailers will help keep the formwork nice and straight going along the line here so we're just using a combination of these pipe clamps which you can get at Home Depot or Lowe's and then these we have 2 by 6 whalers on the bottom and then in the mid section here we have two by 10:00 whalers the reason why we have to buy 10 whalers in the middle is because that's where we're gonna be standing when we're going to be tamping that earth down and then in the center here we have we always put down a concrete footer before the rammed earth to sit on and then we're using some PVC pipe to go around the pipe clamps so that we're able to actually pull those pipe clamps out when there is dirt all around it and depending on how you do your wall section you don't have to have any pipe clamps in the middle here like this all the pipe clamps can be on the outside of it so Jason is just using soil on its property which is really convenient to have your building material right on the property so we're screening it here and trying to get out any of the big rocks and we just want a nice fine dirt mixture we don't want a lot of rocks in it because the rocks don't Tampere well and when you see them in the basically in the finished product they can easily be picked out and fall out of it so we just want to make sure that we are screening it and trying to pick out any of the bigger rocks and then that's going to give us a much more consistent mixture and it's just going to be a much better end product having a tractor to do this work is definitely not necessary it just really speeds up the process for you know moving the dirt screening it mixing it up but you can actually do all this by hand just with a shovel and maybe a cement mixer to do the mixing of the dirt especially for smaller projects that's much more ideal than having big machinery like this but you can see that we mix in some Portland cement in the dirt and Jason is just going around and mixing it up with the front with the front loader on the tractor and just getting a nice very consistent mixture so again on a smaller project we'd probably just use a small cement mixer and just do smaller batches but since we have the availability of the tractor we can use it to basically get the the soil mixed up so the percentages are around 90% soil and 10% Portland cement and for a soil type that is appropriate ratio for making this rammed earth now next thing that we want to do is we want to wet the rammed earth to a point where you don't want it to be soggy or soupy but you also don't want it to be dry so it's it's hard to explain the exact consistency that you want but you want to be able to form it in your hands and drop it and it still retains some of its some of its form so you don't want it to drop down and go with like Punk so when you mix it into a ball you want it to kind of hold its shape but also not be too soupy at the same time so this is actually a very fast method of doing this we're actually able to do this entire rammed earth wall section including installing the forms and doing all this mixing and doing all the tamping in just about four hours time it was really nice to work with all these guys today and one reason why we're so fast and able to get this done so quickly is that pretty well everybody except one person mr. sombrero guy had experience with doing rammed earth so we all kind of knew the ins and the outs of it and that made for definitely a much faster process of getting it done and if you're looking for more details about how to do rammed earth very specific instruction very detailed instruction then definitely check out the rammed earth basics course that Ray and I put together as we go over basically from start to finish of how to do our rammed earth benches and our rammed earth fire pit by our yoga Pavillion and we go into excruciating detail about how to do this and get the best end results and you get a beautiful fire pit and bench set at the end of it and so you can see now the finished formwork with all the whalers all the scissor boards in the middle so those sister boards in the middle are really important for such a long wall section have those in there so that the entire things stays very nice and secure and sturdy and with doing the former you might think oh let's just get it done let's get it up and let's start you know throwing some dirt in there but you really want to make sure that you take a lot of time and make sure it's very very tight and very clean and any gaps that you don't want in your wall make sure you get those closed up but yeah it is an important process to set up that formwork properly first and then getting it to a point where you can start mixing and tamping the dirt in there so again using the tractor so much easier because we're used to actually hauling the dirt up in buckets so having the tractor right there with all the with all the rammed earth mixture it was really really handy and right now we're just throwing in some of the dirt in the bottom there and we want to make sure that all of our lifts so all the dirt lifts that we do that we're gonna be tamping down are very consistent in terms of how much dirt that we're actually putting into it so we had a small piece of rebar that we had a piece of tape on the end and as we were putting the dirt in we're also smoothing everything out so that it's going to be nice and flat but we're using that piece of rebar with the tape on it just to make sure that the depth of the dirt it's going to be consistent across the entire wall section so you want to have I would say somewhere around six to seven inches of dirt when it's uncompressed so once you actually come press it down it'll actually only be about three or four inches worth of dirt worth of rammed earth and this is something that you can test out on smaller wall sections or you can make small forums and just kind of test out the compression and your soil mixture but once we get that dirt in there we want to lightly tamp it once and then we're just using some standard 8 inch tampers you want to tamp it once and then you go back and then you want to tamp hard five times in one place move over tamp five times hard in the next place and then just keep doing that all along the wall section there so we want to make sure that obviously the amount of dirt that we have is going to be consistent but it's also really important to think about how we're compacting the dirt and we want to make sure that the compaction of the dirt is consistent all across to just so that the I mean it can be nice to have some waves in in the lifts in terms of how it looks you want to make sure that it's pretty similar and pretty consistent all the way across so this is probably just the hardest part here with all the tamping physically it's the hardest part because we're just tamping jasons bringing over more dirt so we don't get much more of a break and then we just keep tamping keep tamping keep tamping and just ensuring that we're getting a nice consistent tamp all the way across using our five punches going across to the next spot five more punches and then just doing that all the way across so I think we had four tampers there and that definitely made short work of this of this wall section Jim's even adding in a little bit more water there just so that because as the dirts kind of sitting out in the Sun it's going to dry sort of adding a little bit more but you can kind of see how the mixture is from the video so it's not too wet so it's kind of like wedded but it's not dry and that's the proper mixture that we want in order to get the best best end result and so then here's a final shot there's a couple of different ways of finishing off the top we use actually a combination of Portland cement and dirt we just add a lot more Portland cement in so instead of it being about 10% Portland cement it's somewhere around 30 or 40 percent Portland cement so you can just mix that up in a cement mixer and just pour that on top and then that'll give you a nice cap that's going to protect the rammed earth there's other ways of doing caps I've seen you know brick and mortar on a cap of a rammed earth wall section but you do want to protect the top of it because it will start to erode away and flake away on you so it's great to get out and work with Jason ray Jim and the boys it was a lot of fun we had a good time doing it because doing rammed earth by yourself like that it would be very difficult so it's nice to be able to get a bunch of people together so that you can work on it together you're learning some new skills building community and I think I think it's awesome and you're using something that is just coming straight from the ground as your primary building material so there's going to be lots of other projects that I do on the property here that are gonna be that I'm gonna be using rammed earth I've got a couple of ideas already swirling around in my head and I'm excited to do those but definitely check out the rammed earth basic horse not only does it support my channel but it also supports Ray who essentially does natural building type work pretty well full-time so that's his like day job and get yourself some really good information I think it's almost about two hours worth of material and it's definitely one of the best resources for in doing rammed earth yourself and having that initial knowledge is really important so that you're going to get a beautiful and product and if you're gonna be spending a lot of time and effort not necessarily a ton of money on it but if you're gonna be spending all that time and all that effort doing something like this having that set of instructions initially will certainly help with the learning curve and give you a beautiful end product alright guys thanks so much for watching and we'll catch you in the next video talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Handeeman

Views: 816,940

Rating: 4.6839538 out of 5

Keywords: derek howlett, handeeman, diy, how to, maker, rammed earth, dirt wall, rammed earth construction, rammed earth home, rammed earth homes, rammed earth building, rammed earth formwork

Id: TjyGOOtOFik

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019