Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
TACIT KNOWLEDGE
By the time I attended my first straw-bale wall raising, I had a general
familiarity with the technique and its history. I knew the bales were stacked
like bricks with metal rebars pounded down through them for stability. But
I didn't know, until I started lifting them, that there was a difference in straw
bales, that they came tied with wire or polystyrene cord and were incon-
sistent in length and density.Availability was also an issue. Hay and straw are
harvested in late May and early June in Texas. The reason no wall raisings
had occurred when I first started my field work in January was because that
is the rainy season, particularly bad for exposing bales to moisture, and any
bales purchased during that time would be last year's crop, including stor-
age costs.A pioneer straw-bale contractor related his first lessons about bales
on his initial project:
The biggest thing was that when we went to gather straw, we've got two trailers,
and our first trailer, we pulled up one side of the barn, and the farmer told us to
pull it to the other side of the barn for the rest of it.We, I didn't realize it, but the
. . . strength of the first load was much better than the second load. They gave us
some really loose straw [bales]; so we had two trailers of straw, and uh, also I didn't
know about starting in the four corners at the same time....And so we just started
at one side of the building and worked our way around. So, by the time we got over
to the first side of the building, the straw, we got to the soft straw [bales], and it
compressed much and it just didn't stack up as high either, it just compressed on its
own, even without a roof load. So with the walls just dry stacking, with no load on
it, we had a two-and-a-half inch discrepancy. So, we had to tear all the walls down
and redistribute the bales, and that came out of a phone call to Steve Kimble [an
experienced straw-bale builder in Arizona] in the middle of the night, I was just
totally freaking out. And . . . he says,“I've always been afraid this was going to hap-
pen, and I don't know what else you can do but you know, just tear it down and
reassemble it.” So, we did that. . . .We tore it quite a ways down, . . . enough to get
distribution. And that worked much better.
The same contractor also related that he had mitered the corner bales at 45˚
angles, since that is what he was familiar with, using wood, rather than
butting and overlapping them like a brick corner configuration. He noted
that part of his problem was that he just jumped in without doing his
homework, having missed the local workshop because of other commit-
ments. Nevertheless, he turned to the then-small straw-bale network for
knowledge and salvaged the project.
