Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
When I arrived at my first workshop and wall raising (bringing, as
directed, work gloves, a tape measure, a hammer, and a long-sleeve shirt), a
small portion of wall had already been erected, to be used as a model. We
sat on a semi-circle of bales while the architect/contractor demonstrated
how the bales should be stacked, a whole bale always spanning the break
beneath the two bales under it, even if it had to be custom sized, so that the
8-foot rebars hammered through the bales from the top and the all-thread
pins coming up through the foundation, added onto with fasteners at each
subsequent row of bales, would succeed in pinning the courses of bales to
one another top to bottom and bottom to top. “This seems very straight-
forward,” I thought. “Where is the tacit knowledge?” The architect/con-
tractor then showed us how to make custom bales, those smaller than
regular size, needed to fit the last odd space in a bale course while retain-
ing full bales at wall turns and corners. Customizing the bale involved push-
ing a huge needle, 2 to 2
1
/
2
feet long (made from a flat iron rod or rebar
with a hole in the end of it) and threaded with binding cord, through the
bale exactly where it was already bound, cutting the new twine, and tying
off each end of the bale. This was done twice, at the locations of both
original bindings. When the original binding was cut, two smaller cus-
tomized bales fell out. Again, I thought this technique was quite obvious,
involving little tacit knowledge. We were also shown how to form curved
bales for use in circular or semi-circular walls by setting a bale lengthwise,
with one end propped up on another bale, and kicking it in the middle;
it looked simple. Ten minutes into the first day I knew why I needed the
gloves and the shirt. I put on my work gloves to protect my hands from
binding wire and my long-sleeve shirt to protect my arms from scratchy
straw. Then I tried the techniques shown in the workshop. They were
not so obvious as they seemed, just as watching someone do a calculus
problem is not the same thing as solving it yourself. Making custom bales
was fraught with situational issues. The bales at my first wall raising were
from a farmer in the Texas panhandle who specialized in producing what
he called “construction-grade bales.” Somewhat like the bales produced by
nineteenth-century hay presses, these bales are denser than those produced
by growers for conventional farm use, where the density and uniformity of
the bale is of no consequence. Moreover, despite efforts to protect them by
stacking them under the roof that was already raised in the post-and-beam
section of the house and wrapping them in plastic tarps, they had become
slightly damp in a recent downpour. Our first act after the workshop was
