Category: Phase 3

Our 13 tons of 10mm crushed ballast arrived today, in two separate loads of
4 tons and 9 tons!

13Tons-of-10mm-Ballast

Today, we finished off the 5th row and did as much of the 6th row we can do.
That is another 38 blocks used! This is a total of 289½ blocks we have laid
down these last couple of weeks!!

The next job is to mix up concrete to pour down into each of the hollow
columns.

Row-5-Done-and-6th-As-far-as-possible-2

Row-5-Done-and-6th-As-far-as-possible-1

Today, we ordered 13 tons of 10mm gravel and sharp sand ballast. This is the
quantity we think we need to make the concrete to fill up all the columns in
our hollow blocks we have been building the walls with.

Each “column” will need about 18 to 20 litres of concrete, depending on
whether it is 5 blocks high or 6. We can mix a medium sized load in the
mixer using a half bag of cement and 40 litres of the ballast.

We did well today! We had finished off the 4th row left over from Monday,
and started the 5th row.

We laid down 48½ blocks in two sessions of 23½ in the morning, and 25 blocks
in the afternoon.

The 5th row is the highest we can go for the section that still has the
support structure in place to shore up the bank of soil, but for the other
half, we will do the 5th row and then also do a 6th row as there is nothing
in the way!

Row-5-Mostly-Done-2

Row-5-Mostly-Done-1

We only did half a day of work today, so we did another 22 blocks on our 4th
row of the back wall of the swimming lane.

We had another commitment suddenly pop up and therefore the afternoon
session had to be postponed. Tomorrow is forecast to have heavy rain! So we
will do other tasks in the garage in the dry instead.

Row-4-Mostly-Done-2

Row-4-Mostly-Done-3

Row-4-Mostly-Done-1

This morning, we finished off the 3rd row (7 more blocks), and then started
on the 4th row.

The end wall had another set of reinforcing bars placed horizontally and
then 3 more wide (215mm) blocks in a line, except that the last one near the
front wall needed to be cut down because the front wall on the 4th layer and
above are only using the 140mm wide blocks instead of the 215mm blocks.

We got the diamond cutter disc and our angle grinder, to slice an end off a
215mm standard block (we removed 75mm – the difference between 215mm and
140mm!).

Then We managed to do 14 blocks before we ran out of mortar. That is a total
of 24 blocks this time!

End-of-3rd-Row

Start-of-4th-Row

We did two loads of the cement mixer today, one bag of cement in total. This
allowed us to do a further 39 blocks. 20 this morning and 19 this afternoon.

The steel bars lying horizontally in this row, does make it easy to lay each
block down and just wiggle until it hits the two bars. It does means that we
are using slightly more mortar for the joint as the bars are around 12mm
thick, but we would normally do 10mm thick mortar joints, hence why we have
only done 39 blocks today.

Most-of-3rd-Row-1

Most-of-3rd-Row-2

We got the 2nd row done today before lunch, having started at 9am this
morning. That was 21½ blocks put down. We split one of the concrete blocks
in half, the block was pre-made to allow for easy splitting and indeed it
was!

Then after lunch, we cut 1500mm reinforcing bars and bent 4 of them to start
laying them on the end wall, and 2 long 6metres bars horizontally on the
back wall.

We built up the end wall and around the corner on the front wall, to build
up the two layers, so those steel bars can be put on. We did 16 blocks until
we ran out of mortar, by which time it was approaching 5pm. So we stopped
then.

It is looking good with the 3 layers on the end wall and progressing down
the lane!

Second-Row-Finished-1

Second-Row-Finished-2

Second-Row-Finished-3

End-Built-Up-3-Rows-2

End-Built-Up-3-Rows-3

We did only a half day of work today, as we had other commitments in the
morning.

On Monday, we tried mixing the mortar with 4litres and 50ml of Plasticiser
but it was quite stiff so we had to add more water. Today, we did 4litres
and 75ml of plasticiser and it seems to be much better this time!!

We did 25 blocks. We found that our template for guiding and controlling the
amount of mortar to put down on the blocks was slowing things down too much
so we went back to putting a layer of mortar by hand and just used the
template on the vertical joint to control the thickness. It worked out much
better that way and we could get a controlled placement of the block and it
didn’t run away with us!!

Second-Row-Started-2

Second-Row-Started-3

Second-Row-Started-4

Second-Row-Started-1

It took us about 4 hours to do the 25 blocks this time, a full mixer load of
mortar. So it looks like us doing one load in the morning and another one
after lunch to do 50 blocks.

Date:21/02/2016 18:33

We started building the back wall of the swimming lane today! We managed to
do 43 blocks with 3 mixer loads of mortar before it got dark. Each row of
the wall contains 50 blocks and we are doing 5 rows at this stage.

It was quite difficult in keeping consistent with the mortar gap between the
concrete blocks and not let it “run” ahead! We had to keep it down to 10mm
or less because we got our steel rods going up through the hollow cores,
meaning keeping the rods fairly clear of the edges of the blocks.

And the other discovery we learnt, is the sloppiness of the mortar mix. Each
concrete block are much heavier than house bricks so they press down with
27kg of force, on their narrow edges, which means they squeezed out the
mortar if it is too sloppy.

We make a strong mortar mix using 1 bucket of sharp sand with 2 buckets of
soft sand (a “Builder’s” bucket is about 13litres) which gives a total of
40litres of sand, together with a 10litre bucket of cement (a complete 25kg
bag fills just about 2 10litre buckets).

Currently, we are working with 4litres of water (plus 100ml of plasticiser)
and this produces a slightly sticky and sloppy mix which just about holds up
the block.

It takes a little while for our electric mixer to produce the “flop”
consistency, and it seems that the plasticiser then starts creating
microscopic air bubbles which makes the mix even more sloppy after another
couple of minutes. We think we will reduce the plasticiser down to 50ml in
our next mix.

We will inspect our build in the morning to judge the quality of our current
mortar mix!!

Only 207 blocks to go!!

First-42-Blocks-placed