Owner-Built Home & Homestead
(Page 8 of 15)
In 1920 a New York architect, Ernest Flagg, developed the first truly successful labor-saving device for the construction of rock walls. His "mosaic rubble" system of forming walls has the advantage of being totally integral, as no external bracing is required. The form is attached to and rests on 4 X 4 sleepers, which are embedded four feet apart in the concrete foundation wall while it is being poured. Then, on each end of the 2-foot-long sleepers, a 4 X 4 upright is fastened, the length equal to the desired wall height. A movable 12-foot-long aligmnent truss is employed at the upper limits of these vertical uprights. Between the foundation sleepers and the alignment truss, the rock wall is laid. Movable 2 X 6 or 2 X 8 planks rest against the inner sides of the uprights. When one layer of the rock and concrete reaches its initial set, these planks slide upward and are held in place by toggle pins. In practice the rock is merely set against the outside plank and the rest of the space poured with a weak concrete mixture (1 cement, 5 sand, 10 gravel). When the forms are removed, the outside wall may be pointed (cement mortar trowled in between the rock joints) or left untreated, as desired.
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Following Flagg's original scheme, another Eastern architect, Frazier Peters, built a number of mosaic rubble houses. Later he devised his own personal brand of wall forming, which involves erecting a complete wooden shell on all four walls and placing the rock and mortar against this. Peter's system appears unnecessarily involved, although he patented a few rockwall building ideas which are well worth consideration.
About 25 years ago Helen and Scott Nearing started to build rock structures on their Vermont homestead. The program was ambitious, and so they naturally considered in great detail many of the different forming methods suitable to amateur-type owner construction. An adaptation of Flagg's mosaic rubble form was employed by them in the construction of nine rock buildings. First they assembled a large quantity of 18-inch-high plywood forms of varying lengths. When set in position on a wall, each pair of forms was tied together with wires, a procedure suggested by Flagg. After a first set of forms was filled with rock and concrete (using a proportion of 1 cement, 3 sand, 6 gravel), a second set of forms was placed on top and also filled. When the concrete in the upper form reached initial set, the wires in the lower form were cut and that form placed on top of the upper one, and tied with new wires. This climbing form method of rockwall construction proved to be an ingenious improvement in many respects over Flagg's plank-and-stud system.
Movable wall-building machines, like the Magdiel form, can be used successfully for building rubble walls. Labor costs can be halved, and amateur masons can produce walls of a professional standard with the help of this simple mechanism. Another type of movable form can be made out of sheathing, braced from the inside. This panel should be large enough to take care of all the stone that can be laid in one day's work. In the morning, after the wall from the previous day's work has set, the form is moved to a new position and the rock-laying continued. As the rock-laying is done from the outside, the inside form can be braced to the floor or to window and door frames.
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