[Cob] Cobbing in Washigton, DC

[Raduazo at aol.com]

Well, the bench at Tuckahoe is pretty much  finished. (I have a few pictures 
if anyone is interested.) It was made with a  combination of rototiller cob 
and kid stomped cob. The kids who ranged in age  from first grade to 6th grade 
level did a remarkable job. You have to make some  allowances though. they will 
never do as well as adults and you need to settle  for wet cob and not build 
too fast. I scheduled my cobbing days at Tuckahoe so  that there were at least 
three drying days between each of the building days and  did not push for 
speed or volume.
    There were two techniques that I used with the  kids. The first was 
conventional tarp mixing. I went through a batch with one  group of kids then 
handed it over to the second team to put on the wall. Started  a second batch then 
left the kids in the middle of the batch and started a third  batch and then a 
fourth batch with additional groups of kids going from tarp to  tarp to check 
progress.
    The kids to not want to roll the tarp enough but by  the end of the day 
they were rolling it without prompting.
    The second method that I used was slab mixing with  a rototiller. Here we 
put out about 1-2000 pounds of mix on a parking slab and  rototilled it. Then 
I gave the kids a hose and had them water and mix with their  feet. After a 
short time (When the top surface seemed pretty saturated) I called  them off 
the pile and rototilled it again, then gave them the hose again and had  them 
continue mixing.
    After a while we had sections of the pile that was  too wet and portions 
of the pile that was too dry so we put out a tarp and put  shovels of wet on 
the tarp and toped that with a few shovels from the dry side  and had the kids 
refine the mix on the tarp.
    Then shoveled the mix in to wheelbarrows and rolled  it to the wall. One 
batch that used only adult workers used only tiller mixing  and went directly 
to the wall from the slab.
    Anyway the wall has been capped with paper/cob  plaster. WE plan to let 
it dry for a week and paint this with linseed oil and  then coat the vertical 
surfaces with lime plaster.
    I will be posting dates and times for the lime  plaster coat for anyone 
interested in learning this technique. It should happen  some time in mid 
September.
Ed
Ed