Hi Gerry Parent and others on this thread
I love all the information in this thread and all the photos - thanks so much for sharing your wisdom.
I live in London, UK and have a very small garden and so want to maximise the planting space. I've opted for this ferrocement method of building for some raised garden beds, as:
- it takes up minimal space compared to what the straight lines of bricks or railway sleepers would take up
- allows me to choose organic rounded shapes for the walls which would otherwise be limited to straight lines made by other building materials
- it's pretty simple and doesn't require heavy lifting and shipping of heavy building materials
- it's much more affordable than bricks etc!
I'm especially grateful to Gerry Parent for all the information about the fabric dipping - what a great way to use up old material! So I have my rebars in the ground, the chicken wire cladding them and am about to go outside and do my first layer of concrete. I'm imagining it will be a bit like putting a plaster cast on someone who's broken their wrist with the difference being using concrete instead of plaster of paris as the hardening agent. Wish me luck - I'll come back with an update soon
Gerry Parent wrote:Being my first time at this, there was a learning curve. Choice of fabric was one of them. I had a whole pile of old towels, bed sheets, old curtains etc saved up for rags and drop cloths and not sure which ones to use I experimented with them all. I had read that dipping the cloth first in water to hydrate them before coating with a cement slurry was to help the fabric absorb the cement better. That made total sense and worked just fine with all the fabrics. Where it differed though was during the cement slurry application. The thicker cloths held a lot more cement and became much heavier and harder to handle bigger pieces and vise versa for the thinner fabrics. So obviously, you can get much more coverage using the thin ones and it was also a lot easier to wring out the excess slurry before draping them over the form work.
It seemed like a sure winner to use the thin fabric from now on....that is, until I inspected my work I did yesterday this morning.
The thin bed sheets had barely gotten stiff while the thicker ones had actually hardened up and held their shape well. So it looks like I'm going to have to go back over the thin areas with thicker fabrics. No big deal, just good to know.
Another thing I learned is that when I built the form work, it all had nearly vertical sides - some actually curved inwards and this meant that when I draped the cement soaked cloth over it, some of the sides didn't even touch the chicken wire and just dangled with no support behind them, making it almost impossible to plaster. Similar to what I think you found out Daniel.
It would have been better to taper the form work so that it was wider at the bottom and narrower at the top.
Will continue my experiments and report what works/ doesn't work for me.
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