The Rural Housing Knowledge Network featured in yesterday’s blog post is a treasure trove. I doubt most readers will spend an hour or more surfing the sites we profile, so I decided to feature one story on their website.
“Rammed earth is one of the oldest construction techniques using earth or soil. Together with other techniques which use un-baked earth such as in adobe bricks or cob, rammed earth buildings have a continued history in many regions of the world. In India, this has been traditionally used in many rural areas all over the country. Simply speaking, rammed earth walls are constructed by putting damp earth in between two forms and ramming the earth into a high density mass. The two sides of formwork are erected and secured together by tie rods to provide resistance to the outward thrust on the formwork during the ramming process. The formwork for rammed earth can be fabricated using a steel or wooden frame with plywood or metallic sheets, depending on specific requirements of house design and also the type of finish needed.
Typically, formwork is sized for rammed earth section of length upto 8 feet, height of wall 2’ and wall thickness of 9”.
In this method, earth is rammed in smaller blocks of 2 feet length, using formwork which can easily be installed and shifted to adjacent sections of the wall.”
Hi
I’m inspired to construct my home at farm using ur 2ft frame work. Please call me 9980562847
The contact information is unknown.
wud k=like to work on this method of construction. kindly mail me ur details to contact.
Contact them.
We perform the structural engineering on Rammed Earth, Earthbag and Straw Bale in different States across the US. Green building projects are becoming more and more popular. We are also seeing an increase in solar systems, jet stoves and other energy saving technics being employed. More and more municipalities are beginning to understand and accept these green building alternatives. Now I call that progress. Very few engineering firms work with Rammed Earth, Earthbag, Cob, Straw Bale and others. You should know we work with them a lot and we carry licenses in 46 States. See us at http://www.structure1.com, thanks.
It looks like Structure1.com is the leader now. Good job guys.
A couple of years ago I was thinking seriously about using rammed earth to build a small test structure. (I was going to build a cob oven, on top) But I decided to use earthbags instead, since the “forms” are so much easier to deal with than normal rammed earth. This technique fixes that potential difficulty, so that is awesome.
Good point. Earthbags have a lot of advantages over rammed earth.
Thanks Owen. ANYTHING other than the standard building process and procedure is a blessing. Better and wiser building techniques.