Soil Tests

Unfortunately This project has been put on hold once again. The city shut us down... but the good part is that it had nothing to do with it being rammed earth. They stopped the project because they said we could not have another structure on our 2 acre lot the size of our house. They wanted us to cut out lot to create another lot to build the structure. This would add considerable to the cost as we would ahve to pay for the surveys, paperwork, and most of all city services. This put the project out of range for now. We are not giving up though but we will do this when we are looking to build a new house here, and we may have to split the lot to do it.

Regardless we did spend much money in gathering and testing samples before we had to kill the project. Out 2 samples came from the sand pits on the trinity river (http://www.johndhallsandgravel.com/). One was very sandy and the other was from a more clay-like vein. Apparently these two are common in the pit. The operator was willing to mix them in the proportions we specified. We were doing the test to find the perfect mixture.

I have attached the PDF of th first UCS (Unconfined compressive strength). This test is very promising. The 65/35 mix with 5% cement came to just over 300PSI. We hadn’t even dialed it in. Unfortunately we will have to wait to test further with new samples. In my mind though, this confirms that we have a great local source for Rammed earth right here in Dallas. The total cost quoted to us for the ammount we needed for the whole building was only $800 (and we should have to find trucking so add another $1500-2000). That is great.