Rain Delay

Yesterday, it took us quite a bit of time to sort out the few things we had left unfinished from Tuesday. We ground off the sharp edges of our tamping tools, marked out the various details inside our wall cavity, finished installing our chamfers, built a chute, tested and fixed a few problems with the pan mixer, marked out all our buckets with the correct volumes of lime, stone and water according to our recipe and fixed the bend in our walers by installing spacers between opposite walers.

We then started building a 'training' wall where we ran everyone through each of their tasks. We also showed the crew how to tamp the soil to the correct hardness. We tested our Zimbabwean compaction testing tool, but at 2N/mm2 it leaves an impression on most of the test sites. However if it was set to 1.5N/mm2, I am confident it would not. Nevertheless, the depth of the indentation that it makes gives us a clear indication of the quality of the compaction and we will continue using it at the current setting. By the time we were ready with the main event, it was too late and therefore planned to start on it today.

But today looked something like this:


In fact, we had 40mm of rain during the day which meant that the postponement due to rain was likely to last well beyond the weekend. The weather report is not very promising and this is proving to be very frustrating.