Sean and Anna Renaud arrived on the 1st of July and for the next couple of days we pounded tires as I described in my last post. Speaking for myself (although I suspect everyone else will agree) I was exhausted after a couple of days of this activity. Each tire was taking a good half hour to fill and compress and the pounding was brutal. Everybody laughed on the third day when I told them that I crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep … but I really was not joking!
There had to be a better way … I searched fruitlessly on the internet for a couple of evenings and did not come up with any obvious solutions. I did establish from a couple of different blogs that the tire size we are using is large and other people have struggled to pound tires this large as well.
Anna actually solved the problem by telling me to visit this web site (http://homepages.callplus.net.nz/~b.gubb/tyre_press.html). These people built an earthship in New Zealand and also struggled with pounding larger tires. They solved the problem by building a simple tire press. Intrigued, I studied the press in the pictures on this web page. I figured it could not be worse than pounding them by hand so decided to try building my own press …
The packer worked but it had some problems; it was difficult to load dirt into the tire around it because it was too big, and the packing plates were so big that it was difficult to position the packer in the tire.
I truly appreciate the expression “we are cooking with gas” now because we are packing with oil and man is life easier!
We do find that the gravel we are packing needs to be damp, and that the packer does not work well with clay.
We packed 27 tires today and it was a lot of work, but not impossible work.
We hope to finish the base round of tires tomorrow (83 tires total) then we will be starting the second layer and the perimeter drain.
How did the tyre press work out in the end? We found ours too powerful, had to build a metal band to keep the tyre from deforming. It looks like you guys are making awesome progress.
It worked really well. Really it filled them at about the same speed as using sledges. But saved on muscles. Really, we should have had three units or so…then we would have seen speed. Our tire press had great control, so deforming the tires wasn’t an issue. Compaction was always a question for us…was our tire press as good as packing with sledges? When we visited the Gralind Farms project last summer when the Biotecture crew was there, the first thing we did ws go up to the tires and bang on them and give them a good feel. Ours felt JUST as good. So I’m not at all worried about how our press worked. Do you have pictures of your press? We’d like to see it….