[Strawbale] Brian Z. - welded wire mesh

[Raftercat5 at aol.com]

From: "Brian Zimbelman" <brian at zimbelman.com>
Subject: Re:  [Strawbale] 2x2" galvanized welded wire mesh for SB house
To:  <strawbale at listserv.repp.org>
Message-ID:  <81C80916687B429E9B81F59A52B761E3 at circlez>
Content-Type:  text/plain;    charset="us-ascii"

I had never thought of using  welded wire fencing for the sides of the
strawbale. I assume you sew it into  the bales then? I mean pinning it
wouldn't do much good structurally. Do you  also staple/nail it to the
post & beam structure? Are you putting it on  the inside, outside or
both?

It was mentioned that the building  inspector accepted this in lue of 3
rebar per bale. Does that mean you are  not pinning the bales at all? I
pinned my bales with 2 bamboo posts each.  Already had the roof up, for
the top row, just pinned from below at a slight  angle. Not perfect, but
fairly stable. Then whenever a bale came into contact  with either the
posts or beams, I tied them to the wood structure. Sorry, no  load
bearing structures allowed by code in NM. I found the structure was  very
solid this way.

Finally sewed chicken wire onto the bales mainly  to make it much easier
to stucco. I wasn't going to use the chicken wire,  just stucco to the
bales, but I did an experiment, and found that the stucco  adhears to the
chicken wire much much easier then it does directly to the  straw, and
since I'm fairly new to stucco work, I decided to make it easy on  myself
(sort of).

I do have some 4x4 welded wire laying around with  nothing in particular
for it to do. I wish I had thought about this earlier.  There are some
places where it's structure would help to make everything go  together
much better. Even with sewing it in, I could see the rigidity of  the
welded wire helping with certain shaped areas when it comes to  making
something to put the stucco onto.

-- bz

bz:  Yes,  we'll be 'sewing' the 2x2 welded wire mesh to the bales.  We'll be 
putting  it on the inside and the outside walls.  We'll be using big staples 
and  fastening it to the bottom 4x4 which is J-bolted to the concrete floor, 
and to  the wood at the top plate.  We took Andrew Morrison's good advice and  
bought some Simpson's GVC-50 epoxy capsules to fasten the 4x4's that will be 
on  the floor on the inside, as we won't know how wide the bales will be for us 
to  place the J-bolts in the concrete until we get the bales.  So, hubby will 
 be drilling holes for them and putting the bolts in place with the epoxy  
capsules.  I love that idea.  (Thanks, Andrew, if you're reading  this!)  
I feel so confident building this house, because I know if we run across a  
problem, I can turn to all you knowledgable people here for some good  advice!  
- Kathy (who is tired from taping the plastic sheets together under the  
concrete slab today...)



************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com