Quinn Mas-Aboudara

Ok so apparently it's been a while since I've been on here and to be honest I haven't had a whole lot of time to spend experimenting with everything, however I did manage to do one thing this summer that may help out with some of my future endeavors.

Last summer I built a smoke house, nothing fancy, just four walls, a small door, hanging racks, etc. Now when I built the smoke house I built it in the way that has been passed down in my family with a small open fire pit on a bed of sand and gravel in the center of the smoke house which we then build a small, green alder fire and maintain at a decent smoulder.

This summer I felt that this may be able to be improved upon and I also wanted to try experimenting with the idea of a smokehouse/drying area since my wife doesn't particularly enjoy the smell of fish or venison drying in the house and absolutely adhors the image of strips of meat hanging from the ceiling above our bed.

SO! That said I built a horseshoe shaped fire ring in the smoke house using cedar based cob and a clay wash. I allowed it to dry and firm for about a week and then fired the entire thing in the smoke house using green alder (which reaches temperatures high enough to forge metals with and was utilized in pioneer days in lieu of coal which was sometimes difficult to obtain in Alaska).

And it turned out beautifully! Granted because of the open design of the smoke house the structure did not retain the heat required to dry meats, so we still had meat hanging over our bed for the summer, but the cob fire ring worked nicely and I was able to get some insight into charring recently after a horrible windstorm blew over the smoke house.

The short of it is that I ran out and grabbed the fire ring which was being exposed to some very nasty weather (the clay wash was holding up very nicely however) and because I realized that I would be having to rebuild anyways I simply broke open the fire ring. Besides the fact that this was actually a bit more difficult than I had initially anticipated and required the use of a hammer I was also anticipating that the cedar would be heavily charred as had been mentioned previously. To my surprise I could not find evidence of charring in the cedar bark! And this is with direct heat to the cob itself (granted there is a thin clay wash but not enough I would think to dissipate the heat?)!

I would like to note also that the fire ring/smoke house was heavily utilized this summer, averaging about 35-40 hours a week between myself, my brother, and other friends and family, it was used pretty much the entire months of July and August... much to the horror of some of my more "civilized" neighbors...

Needless to say I am impressed and amazed and am looking forward to some favorable weather so I can begin working on the RMH project again.

I'm in southeast Alaska and I'm using pacific red cedar (Thuja plicata) bark. I typically harvest it in mid spring and let it dry then once dry I simply sit back in my reclined and peel it strip by strip from the top to bottom. I've tried breaking it up several different ways and have found it much less effective than just doing it by hand.

Thanks for the reply! I've been experimenting and messing with the clay/sand mixtures (my wife would like a cob "gazebo" in our back yard) now that I'm getting the mixture down.

I had actually simply found a clay bank that was super clean. I dug off the top foot or two of clay and collected clay from under that. It was amazingly clean! I did a water test and it showed a very low amount of sand and silt and primarily clay. The clay is super clean with barely anything in it! I'm currently drying half of it to powder it for easier mixing and have been experimenting with the other half making cob bricks.

So far I've found that it gets super thin and "soupy" then I start adding sand and it starts to firm up a bit but it doesn't look like anything I've seen in videos on making cob or in the various books/manuals I've found so I've been experimenting with various soils.

So far wood ash seems to be excellent to get that consistency and in the test bricks I've made it seems to hold together real well.

I've also been experimenting with different "rebar" material such as straw, cedar bark, and combinations and so far I've been super impressed with the cedar bark even more so than the straw.

I just finished several different bricks and I've tested them by dropping them from approximately 12' onto solid concrete. And so far the jury has come back with the verdict that the cedar bark bricks are amazing! One of the test bricks I dropped three times from my test height before it developed any major cracks! That's exciting since I figure that I won't be dropping my bench so it should have some amazing strength and resiliency!

Another thing that I discovered was that I had wondered why everyone used their feet to mix the cob. Now after mixing about 50lb of test batches by hand I've stumbled upon the true secret... It saves my back by doing it by foot!

So I'm looking at making a rocket stove with an attached cob bench. I've never worked with cob but have been researching it extensively. I've recently begun gathering materials and received an excellent tip on a source for clay and the one thing that I noticed right away is that the clay is very clean, next to no silt or anything besides clay. And in my reading I've noticed people reference "clay rich soil" which I'm curious about.

Does it matter if I use pure clay (without "soil") in my cob mixture or should I be grabbing some dirt from my back yard to mix in as well?