[Strawbale] Lime Plaster, The Magic Numbers

[Rob Tom]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:04:51 -0400, Debbie Johnson-Jackson  
<strawfly207 at gmail.com> wrote:

> How do we go about determining how much lime and other materials to  
> order?

Debbie;

WRT to the sand, I'd say simply order a tri-axle load.
The cost difference between a single-axle, tandem or tri-axle dumptruck  
load will be negligible. It's the trucking that costs.

When building a house, having a pile of extra, coarse, washed sand around  
is like having a pile of extra cash around. It's seldom a Bad Idea and is  
usually a useful thing to have.

But to answer your question:

To determine the volume of sand needed for a specific amount of plaster,

(i) simply take the area (in your case 5700 sq ft)
(ii) multiply it by the thickness (in your case (0.75 inches divided by 12  
inches per foot)
(iii) and that will yield the volume of sand in cubic feet.
(iv) Divide that number by 27 (cu ft per yard) to get the number of yards.

A tri-axle dumptruck will hold between 18-22 yds.

As for the lime, if the recipe calls for 1 part lime to 2 parts sand (dry  
volume?), then the amount of lime is simply half the volume of sand (as  
determined in (iii) above).

Look on the side of the bag to see what the volume per bag is and divide  
that number into the above to get the number of bags required.

"Stone Tool" asked almost the same question (but WRT cement plaster) on  
this List not too long ago. I may have given a better answer at that time  
so you may want to check the List archives.


-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c  at chaffY a h o o  dot  c a >
manually winnow the chaff from my edress in your reply