Plastering party: 18th-20th May

Duel purpose post here: a little update on workshop happenings and an open invite to come and learn/do some clay mixing and plastering on the straw bale walls. So the weekend: the scene is set, we have some bale walls crying out for plaster, a lovely load of clay earth and other ingredients to mix some plaster with, now all we need is your enthusiastic hands and feet to help put the whole lot together!

This should be really good fun: play with mud, learn new skills and experience different, natural building materials, check out the invention studio so far, and enjoy the beautiful surroundings at the Golden Hill Centre. We’ll start Friday evening and carry …Continue reading »

The Straw Bale walls so far…

It has been some time since the main wall construction was completed, but I see that the last blog post on it shows it in early stages, so lets have a little update. We were not able to properly render finish the wall last year because of the cold weather –  both clay and lime render, don’t like the frost, but now spring is here we can finally finish them off. That’s what we are doing right now, but I am getting ahead of myself, before we start blogging about the clay plastering process, here’s just a quick review of the workshop walls and doors…

When we had all the bales in place, the walls were pre-compressed with heavy duty (5 tonne) ratchet straps. This is an important …Continue reading »

Just a little update on the sideways burning stove for you. The door is now opening and shutting quite nicely – the tensioning latches you can see below will hold the loading chamber door against the glass rope sealing strip (once we put it in). We picked up a few of the latches from e-bay quite cheaply – hopefully they will do the job and the springs will last through the thermal cycling they will receive.  We made little hooks on the body of the stove for the catches, out of old nails and weld filler (our exciting little go at weld sculpting).

Next we needed a way of sealing the bottom of the big door against the combustion chamber. What we ended up with were two hinged …Continue reading »

If you have been following our scrap made wood stove progress, you will already have seen a glimpse of the power hacksaw, but we did promise more… Here is a little video and some info on the saw.

It came from Aberystwyth University, where it has sat in storage for years, unused and unloved. There were a few other things being sold off, in a secret …Continue reading »

Beginning to Weld!

Ok so the weather is going bazaarly hot, what better way celebrate than by donning the welding gauntlets, sweaty mask and continuing the sideways-burning, self-loading stove project (see the first instalments if that makes no sense). We get the welding ball rolling by tack welding the primary and secondary burn chambers together.

Once we are satisfied with the position we can set to and try some proper welds. Here is the first weld seam, certainly not …Continue reading »

With spring in the air, it would be nice to get on with this before we loose all motivation for the joys of a cosy warm wood burning stove. There haven’t been any real objections to the original stove design, so with a tweak here and there it is time to see what happens when we start making it! Before anything else it is important to completely empty the the gas bottles of propane (I didn’t really need to say that right?!).

Making the gas bottles safe to cut

Propane is about half again denser than air, so even when the valve has been open for a long while and nothing appears to be coming out, there will probably still be propane gas lingering in there. By turning the bottles upside-down and letting them sit, valve open,  for a few days, the heavier propane gas will fall out. Even after this, there may be some of the flammable gas remaining in there, so it is a good idea to remove all doubt by filling it with water. This removes the remaining gas by displacement.

To get the water in we need to remove the brass valve. By convention the valve on propane cylinders unscrews clockwise - that’s the opposite way to normal! It you try this expect the valve to be very tight in its thread. Above you can see our …Continue reading »

Long have I been jealous of Bongo’s combination mitre saw and table saw, and his ability to quickly and easily to produce accurate cuts of any angle. This was never a problem when I lived down the road but since moving away to the country I have had to rely on either jigsaw or circular saw or in the worst case make cuts completely without electrical current of any kind. Therefore I was pleased as punch when a Bosch GKG 24V (cordless) came up on a well known auction site. Sold as seen with a rumbling noise, sparks and broken bush cover. I purchased for a very agreeable price hoping that a combination of the base unit and a corded circular saw I have knocking around could produce a hybrid unit.

However on arrival the saw was in …Continue reading »

Light is good. Dark is dangerous, in the workshop at least. As I have been working out on/in the ‘shop ’til quite late many evenings over the Winter, getting some proper lighting going on will be quite blissful. It is surprising how tiresome working in poor light conditions can be.

Being a rather large space, compared to your average room in a house, the workshop needed a number of lights and a lot of versatility. As we got a haul of nice light fittings to use, and some new LED bulbs to put in them, we need a ‘grid switch’ to control the lighting of the room. A ‘grid switch’ (also called a ‘switchbank’) is basically a …Continue reading »

We have got to the point where there is no longer a gale blowing through the workshop (yay!): doors are shutting, and fiddly insulation and air tightness detailing is well under way. The obvious next step is to start considering a heat source. Passive solar gain is already in effect – the inside is staying about 5 degrees above the external temp, which is about zero degrees at the moment (yes working out there is cold). Although that’s quite encouraging, and it will be interesting to see how much better things get when the porous straw walls are properly rendered, we are thinking that another heat source is going to be needed. Especially when doing less energetic and more technical hackery.

Having a reasonable supply of wood on the Golden Hill site, a wood burning device of some sort seems like a good, carbon neutral plan. Bongo has been wanting to have a go at making a wood burning stove from scrap materials for some time anyway so…

First step: research, think about materials, and dream up …Continue reading »