Rethink Your Life! Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy |
The Work of Art and The Art of Work Kiko Denzer on Art |
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Good Roof & Bad SaunaM J Epko duckchow at ix.netcom.comTue Oct 8 23:25:08 CDT 1996
Thanks for the mail help, Shannon! * Other stuff: In response to my inability to figure out how to attach the roof, Shannon wrote: >Actually you just embed your attachment in the cob, the specifics depend >on the desired attachment technique, but you could for example wrap short >sections of steel cable around small chunks of fire wood and embed the >chunks of wood in the wall a foot or so below the top of the wall with the >cables extending up through the top to attach to. Alternatively you could >make an inverted wooden 'T' and embed it in the wall with the base of the >'T' sticking up out of the top of the wall. This helps! I was going the right direction, but on the wrong track. I *was* missing something obvious, but only by a little. (A dangerous little, yes...) * I wrote, confusingly: "... a somewhat spiral-like (like a top view of a snail shell) cob structure..." and Shannon responded: >I am not sure I understand this correctly, is the cob spiraling up so >that is forms an interior roof as well as support structure? If so, this >would make me nervous, but I have a general philosophy of never putting >anything over my head that I wouldn't want to fall on it. Heh-heh-heh. Good philosophy. No, I'm not so bold as to build a cob dome. I should more accurately have said "like the outline of the top view of a snail shell." Like a hastily-drawn circle whose beginning and end don't match. Like a stylized "G". Just yer standard vaguely elliptic almost-circle. Nothing fancy. The entire structure would be sort of like a wagon wheel laying on the ground: the large hub made of cob and the tire-part would be strawbale. The spokes would be the joists, but would be laying on top of the hub and tire, rather than attached to the middle of them. * I wrote: >> ... should the bathroom side of the cob wall be >> waterproofed, or do we suspect that the direct ventilation will suffice? The >> source of my wedded bliss wants a sauna in there - this changes the picture >> some, eh? Shannon responded: >If you are using it for a sauna, then you won't be providing any direct >ventilation while it's performing it's sauna function. Generally I'd agree, since most saunas are gas or electric. This will most likely be a wood-fired affair, and it's my understanding that *very* adequate and active ventilation is vital - not just to cheat death, but to manually moderate the notoriously-difficult-to-control temperature. It depends a lot on as yet undetermined details. We work different shifts & communication is tricky. I frankly don't know if I'm supposed to be planning for a traditional soggy sauna, or a more dry sweat-lodge-type thing. I better find out. Even if it is inside, I don't think I want it to be the whole 12'+ diameter area of the bathroom. I took a class a couple years back on sauna-building from the owner of Finn-Sisu (which by no means makes me an expert), and he stressed the absolute requirement of seemingly ludicrous amounts of available ventilation that should be designed into wood-fired saunas. Maybe I should just make the damn thing outside, as a separate building. That makes a lot more sense to me. * M J Epko duckchow at ix.netcom.com http://www.netcom.com/~duckchow/
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