From the Ground Up

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The Walls

As we began to really build in earnest, we must have looked like an army of worker ants. People were continuously mixing cob as others built. Sometimes we rolled cob into small informally shaped bricks that we Could throw into wheelbarrows, onto other tarps, or line up along walls for cobblers to grab and place where they wished. Other times we just grabbed handfuls of cob off our mixing tarps and plopped them onto the foundation or wall and shaped the wall with our hands. You squish cob into the foundation with your hands or, even better, by stepping on it. It's simple. The wall starts out as wide as the foundation. We followed the tapering formula (taper two inches for every three feet of height, assuming a nine-inch width at the top) on the outside of the wall. To figure out the taper, we cut a styrofoam wedge measuring two inches by three feet and taped it to one side of our level. The idea is to lean the wedge against the outside wall (fat end at top), and trim or shape the wall with your hands or trim it with a machete until the bubble reads level. We used the other side of the level on the inside of the wall to keep it going up straight.

We used our thumbs to knead new layers of cob into old layers of cob. When our thumbs got tired, we picked out some good long thumb-shaped sticks we could press into the cob to knead new layers in. As the walls went up a ways, Becky showed us how she uses her feet for forms. She sat on the ground and placed her feet up on the walls while someone pressed down on the wall from the top.

As we continued to pile cob onto the foundation, eventually it began to "oog" in certain places. Oog is a word cobbers made up to describe how cob squishes off the wall when it has enough mass that it can no longer dry quickly enough to hold its shape. Ooging keeps You from rushing cob; it forces you to let it dry hard so that it's able to hold the load of itself as it goes up. Becky told us when our walls start to oog, this means it's time to stop cobbing for the day. We punched holes in the cob with sticks to help it dry faster and to give us places to knead a new layer of cob into the old layer. Cobbers who live in a dry climate cover their cob work with wet gunny sacks at the end of the day to slow down the drying process. (It's not as easy to add new cob to dry cob.) We didn't bother with gunny sacks in humid Arkansas. The next day when we come back, we took a machete and cut off the oog on the sides of the walls. The cob had dried enough to take on more cob without ooging, yet it was still moist enough that running the machete down the wall cut the excess cob off easily and smoothly. We used a whisk broom to splash water onto the cob wall before we began adding the next layer.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print