First Light On Narrow Pond in Ant Village

A new structure has been birthed On Narrow Pond!

This structure I have named "First Light" which has many personal meanings for me and one more public meaning: it is the structure to catch first light every morning in Ant Village.

First Light stands firmly on its plates and posts without the need for bracing but its walls still need slip straw, windows, and a door.

This thread will be soley for First Light On Narrow Pond:  its finishing, its energy devices, thermal data and any other relevant thing effecting First Light.

First reply on First Light!

You rock, Orin. I can't wait to see this structure complete, and I hope to see it up close soon!

Come on up after dinner if they have you busy down there until 5pm!  My number is in your Purple Moosage inbox

Kyle gave me two hours 10 minutes in work trade today!  Awesome to have intelligent skilled hands to help me get the slip straw going; Thank you Kyle.

It seems the time bottle neck for slip clay is getting the clay crushed into fine particles to suspend into water.

It seems to take four buckets of clumpy clay to make a 4" wide 6" tall and 6 feet long expanse of wall.

three gorrilla cart batches (2/3 capacity of said cart)
four buckets of clay
10 gallons of water
8 hours

9 square feet four inches thick total coverage in that 8 hours.

516 square feet needed.

64.5 hours to slip straw all the walls (not removing the door and windows from the square footage count).

whoa.  going to take me awhile.  

slip clay clearly isn't as fast as I was thinking it would be -solely because the clay must be fully suspended in water.
this means the clay must be very fine

...and no I probably won't get too much faster...the work is straight forward and uncomplicated.

if one already has the clay prepared, it is fast...just as fast as I can mix and soak the clay into the straw.. ...but crushing clay is the real time taker.

I was thinking 3 of 4 days, not a week and a half!

I wonder if the clay chunks could be soaked in water overnight, then broken up with a paint mixing paddle on the end of a drill to get it properly broken up and suspended? That's annoying that it'll take so long to grind it fine.

Josiah pointed this out to me also: bigger quantity of clay, soak it all over night, and stir it in the morning.  

No needed for grinding clay if you wait 24hrs   -a case of being impatient and making extra work because of it   _what_wait_24_hrs_are_you_kidding_me

rained today.  yeah, really rained!

took the day off entirely for me yesterday...no work and since the rain came, no watering either....nice chill day.

soaking lumpy clay for 24 hrs really is the way to eliminate the clay processing time while throwing slip straw.

it took a quarter of the time to finish of this wall cell than the first half of it took.

cardboard....what lurks in your modern composition and glue?

now all that remains of unauthorized building material in are plastics and plastic roofing in the skeleton of Hillbilly Mansion

The demise and deconstruction of Hill Billy Mansion evokes many things simultaneously. Some how I feel the pain, labor, and unfulfilled hopes of the builders.  

Hill Billy Mansion is coming apart quickly, with little effort for me armed with a drill.

But I know the hours it took to hew the flat lumber after the trees were fell and drug. I know the effort of lifting all that material many feet off the ground.

So while First Light grew stronger for every screw I removed from Hill Billy Mansion, Hill Billy Mansion became weaker and less reliable for it.

I smile regarding the fact no one has to say, "Why dear, you were conceived in Hill Billy Mansion" while comparing it to "Why honey, you were conceived in First Light On Narrow Pond".

Both are brash bold acts to consider, both have a certain flavor, a certain color.

As the sun sets on the roofless Mansion, I realize these two flavors are where I came from but belong to neither. And turn in the dusk to sleep half way below the earth.