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Cob: East Timor ProjectShannon C. Dealy dealy at deatech.comWed Oct 27 15:23:15 CDT 1999
On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Rosemary Lyndall Wemm wrote: > Another limitation is that the major crops are rice and corn; there is > no wheat to make hay straw. What kind of substitutes could be used? > > - Rosemary The name of the game is fiber, grass can be used (it's what I'm using in the building mentioned in my previous response), as can rice straw (though I hear it is rather hard on the hands and feet), and undoubtedly a variety of other locally available materials will work as well. Some fibers will work better than others, what you are looking for is strength, length (6 to 12 inches is probably best, though you can always cut longer fibers) and how well the sand-clay mix will grip the surface of the fiber once the cob has dried. Ultimately, the best thing to do is to is to take the local materials and try making test bricks using different materials and different proportions. Once they have dried, test them to see how strong they are, how easily they break into two pieces, and if they come apart easily once they have been broken, or if the two pieces remain intact and strongly attached to each other by the fibers between them. Shannon C. Dealy | DeaTech Research Inc. dealy at deatech.com | - Custom Software Development - | Embedded Systems, Real-time, Device Drivers Phone: (800) 467-5820 | Networking, Scientific & Engineering Applications or: (541) 451-5177 | www.deatech.com
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