My first JABOD forge

[Dillion Brian Grant]

Lol yeah true, 

[JHCC]

50 minutes ago, Dillion Brian Grant said:

No they are not, im on my volunteer fire department so yeah i can definatly vouch for you there homestly a burning person is the worst smell ever, if you smell it once you will remember it for the rest of your life

I was living in NYC in 2001 and worked about six blocks from the World Trade Center. Some days, you could smell the burning all the way to 125th Street.

[Dillion Brian Grant]

Oh gosh that had to be terrible

[Frosty]

Agreed Charles, fire is nothing to sniff at.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Dillion Brian Grant]

17 hours ago, Frosty said:

Agreed Charles, fire is nothing to sniff at.

Frosty The Lucky.

Lol agreed, it would probably hurt lol

[Dillion Brian Grant]

hey yall I hit a road block I wasn't expecting, any advice about the easiest and most efficient way to mix up the clay I dug up, I have pieces ranging from pea size all the way to pieces bigger than a bowling ball

[Tommie Hockett]

Good luck buddy. I trued using a paint mixer on a drill... it worked but i had a heck of a mess to clean up. Just add some water till it is pliable. 

[Dillion Brian Grant]

Just now, Tommie Hockett said:

Good luck buddy. I trued using a paint mixer on a drill... it worked but i had a heck of a mess to clean up. Just add some water till it is pliable. 

OMG I tried that yesterday lol

 

[Tommie Hockett]

Lmbo. We will all just learn together then. Also I am not sure if this is fact so just take it as opinion please. I found with personal experience that if you add some wood ash and saw dust the clay doesnt crack quiet as much. Also don't make my mistake... stay away from perlite

Edited October 12, 2017 by Tommie Hockett
It posted the same thing twice...

[Dillion Brian Grant]

1 minute ago, Tommie Hockett said:

Lmbo. We will all just learn together then. Also I am not sure if this is fact so just take it as opinion please. I found with personal experience that if you add some wood ash and saw dust the clay doesnt crack quiet as much. Also don't make my mistake... stay away from perlite

Lmbo. We will all just learn together then. Also I am not sure if this is fact so just take it as opinion please. I found with personal experience that if you add some wood ash and saw dust the clay doesnt crack quiet as much. Also don't make my mistake... stay away from perlite

yeah, idk about the Wood ash but as far as the Saw dust, traditional Japanese Swordsmiths would use straw that was chopped up into 2 or 3 inch pieces mixed with clay to make it stronger, almost like a natural version of cement and rebar/wire mesh

[JHCC]

The key thing with clay is that you do NOT want it to be too wet, otherwise it will shrink and crack as it dries.

On the other hand, you do need a bit of moisture, otherwise it won't stick together as you pack it into the box.

I would suggest that you pound your clay as finely as possible. I'd recommend putting the clay on a concrete slab and crushing it with something heavy (a dropped sledgehammer is good). You don't want fine powder, but you do want it fairly small -- think fine cat litter or coarse sand. Then test the moisture content. You want to be able to pick up a handful, squeeze it hard, and have it hold together when you let go and break if you drop it. If it's too dry, moisten it gently with a watering can, mix thoroughly, and allow to sit for a few minutes to absorb the moisture.

I second @Tommie Hockett's recommendation of adding wood ash. Sand is also good. I've never tried sawdust, but if you do, make sure that it's not from pressure-treated lumber (especially the old stuff). Arsenic fumes are not something you want to mess with.

All of this can be done on the concrete slab. You can also do the mixing in a wheelbarrow. The nice thing about the slab is that you can mix the material fairly easily by scooping it up with a spade and turning it over on itself.

When the raw material is ready, add it to your box and pack it in HARD. Do a little at a time and ram it in with a thick stick or a mallet.

[Dillion Brian Grant]

@JHCC AYE AYE CAPIN'

[JHCC]

Addendum: when testing moisture content, you do not want any visible water, and you don't want any water to squeeze out when you compress a handful of your mix.

 

[Charles R. Stevens]

Traditionally Adobe and cob are mixed buy foot. A plastic storage tub works well as you can put the dry clay chunks in the tub add a bit of water and allow it to "temper" that is let nature spread the moisture evenly. From here you can either sculpt your fired or add such things as sand, horse or cow dung, paper pulp, chopped clay, wood ash etc. depending on your needs. As the box provides the structure in this case, celilose fiber from dung, straw or paper are not nessisary, tho sand to keep slag from sticking and ash to keep the clay from expanding if it gets whet are good. Again traditionally you mix with your feet. Now if your mix is to wet let it set uncovered in a shady spot untile it dies to your liking, put the lid back on and let it set overnight. The dry crust will moisten back up. Not whet enugh? Use a spry bottle to mist it and cover over night (or while your at work) and check again. Whala, simple, low tech mud pie making at its best (adding fiber benefits from a day or two mellowing)

[Charles R. Stevens]

A jar test of your soil will tell you your clay, silt and sand ratioes are. 30% clay, 70% sand I'd s ideal for Adobe, to much clay and it cracks so add sand or ad fiber, to little clay and its weak, fresh cow or horse bung containes peptides that strengthen it, as dose the addition of ash. Silt is a wild card. I didn't get so complicated, I took the dirt from the bottom of a post hole and rammed it into a box. It's rich enugh to make bricks, so not good for a coal fire but armed in low moister it works fine. If you get cracks it's just mud, mist with water, wait a bit and fill in the cracks with more mud. If it says weak rebuild the fire bowl as needed. 

Now if you live down buy TP leave of the box and make Adobe bricks, put together with Adobe mortar (don't butter the sides, that helps key the mud plaster) if you live up in the pasific north west USA or England then sculpt it out if Cobb. Tires with a side wall cut off filled with rammed earth, log cribs, Wattle hurdles, turmight mounds, what ever, whenaent sending this thing to the moon, we are lighting a fire in it.

[Frosty]

I'd pick out the boulders oh heck any stones larger than a pea, they tend to explode if they get too hot and you don't want to take the time to dry them properly. Honest, you don't.

You're being too fancy, over thinking again. Virtually any clayey soil will work just fine as it's dug out of the ground if it isn't too wet. Just, JUST enough moisture it clumps as John describes. Check a casting book for properly tempered green sand and apply the test to soil more clayey. 

Using a concrete slab as a mortar to grind and mix is a good method. If it's already finely divided tolling in a tarp is the soils lab field technique. Toll the material on a tarp, fold it in half and pull the top half to move the fold towards the edge of the bottom half. Pull that back till you can repeat the motion with the bottom half. roll it back and forth twice and stop with the row of soil in the middle and refold the tarp so you're rolling it with the other two edges at 90*. This is a sampling method to get a "Representative" sample which is a sample where all different particles are mixed evenly allowing the guys in the lab to measure gradations accurately.

When we checked gradations against the lab machinery designed to mix and divide soil samples we mixed with and divided in a tarp. A cement mixer never did a fair job of mixing a damp or dry sample. You don't need to know how to divide a sample in a tarp so I won't confuse things further and describe how. 

Tempering the mix in a sealed container is standard practice where even moisture content is important

Remember, you're not doing green sand casting or other technical soils stabilization ALL you need is for it to clump together reasonably tightly. The 30% clay x 70% sand mix is plenty clay rich. Sand will provide room for steam to escape and the liner to shift a little with thermal cycling so it doesn't check (crack.)

It's not a critical thing just DO NOT MAKE MUD!!

Frosty The Lucky.

[Charles R. Stevens]

Use your feet and you won't have to worry about Jerry's warning about stones!

 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

Potters call that wedging the clay, gives an even consistency.

[4elements]

Years ago I wanted to try green sand casting of aluminium and I wanted to mix my own sand. I found plenty of sand recipes but nothing that told me what consistency to aim for, until I called a library search service who told me that it should be like brown sugar, so right between crumbly and sticky, just holding together when squeezed.

[Dillion Brian Grant]

So i guess the walls for my actual fire pit and the floor could be clay and then fill everything else with sand?

[Charles R. Stevens]

As JHCC will tel you, sand is silica, infact it is the sand from the peat beds that became coal that becomes slag. So you will be fighting slag

 

[Daswulf]

 but I consider SLAG my friend. I wouldn't wanna fight him. 

[Frosty]

3 hours ago, Dillion Brian Grant said:

So i guess the walls for my actual fire pit and the floor could be clay and then fill everything else with sand?

too complicated! 7pts sand, 3pts. clay. Just enough moisture you can hand squeeze it into a lump that will break cleanly. If it leaves more dirt than a little dust on your hands add a little dry sand, mix and temper over night. If it crumbles spritz a little water on, mix and temper over night. 

When it's close, start ramming it into the box in 2" - 3" lifts. That's two or three inches of loose mix spread evenly and hammer it hard with a mallet, board, smooth rock, etc. add another lift and repeat. When it reaches the top of the box or is as deep as you like, dig out the trench and ram the surface smooth and hard.

Then install the tuyere and build a fire.

Frosty The Lucky.

[JHCC]

6 hours ago, Dillion Brian Grant said:

So i guess the walls for my actual fire pit and the floor could be clay and then fill everything else with sand?

As my old advisor in college used to say, "You could do that.... It won't work, but you could do it!"

What that will do is give you a relatively tough skin over a very unstable foundation. That skin will wear, crack, chip, and eventually crumble, and you'll end up with your fire in a hollow of shifting sand. You don't want that. 

[Dillion Brian Grant]

19 hours ago, JHCC said:

As my old advisor in college used to say, "You could do that.... It won't work, but you could do it!"

What that will do is give you a relatively tough skin over a very unstable foundation. That skin will wear, crack, chip, and eventually crumble, and you'll end up with your fire in a hollow of shifting sand. You don't want that. 

Well, I was meaning if I did the walls of the fire pit approximately 3-4 inches thick and the bottom approximately 2-4 inches of clay