Wind and rain try to disrupt progress

The dark picture is due to the weather not the time of day, it shows the difficulty we face with covering over all of the straw each day with tarpaulins and braces to prevent the straw walls collapsing or getting wet.

Straw walls are on the up

Here are some images of the straw walls being constructed on site. It shows each stage from the first bale being positioned to the hazel stakes being driven in. Progress on site has been rapid with the spell of good weather helping us (for the moment). We currently have five courses of bales in place with two to go, this will happen when the scaffolding has been erected.

Ring beam is almost in despite the weather

Work is almost complete on the first ring beam so that the straw can be installed. Here you can see that we are using ratchet straps to bring the beam into square. We checked the diagonal measurements which are within 10mm of each other so already a very good level of accuracy is being achieved by the college students. All carpentry students so far have been 16 or 17 years old so this does bode well for a quality workforce for the future.

We had great difficulty lifting the sections of beam over the tie down bolts but with a bit of persistance and and a few well directed hammer blows all is in place and located in the correct position over the tyres.

600 pointy sticks arrive!

On a soaking wet day last Friday Brian Williamson and his apprentice Ruth delivered their load of pointed hazel rods, which will be used to spike the straw bales together. The rods are superbly uniform and very smart - shame they will be hidden inside the straw once the building is up!

150 bales have also arrived on site and the walls will start to go up this coming week.

Carpentry students get stuck in

Carpentry students begin the construction of the ring beam by cutting 18mm ply wood into strips ready to make a beam for setting the straw bales onto the foundation of tyres. These foundation students had never used this type of powered skill-saw before so they were a little apprehensive, but by the end of the day 88 strips had been cut to the correct width.

As you can see we have also erected a temporary shelter to keep out the worst of the weather.

The next stage for the carpenters is to screw it all together to form the beam as you can see here.