Rockler Visit

[Swingman]

Your ignorance is showing ...

[Swingman]

You're indeed correct. In fact, many municipalities have straw bale construction codes in areas of the country where it is feasible to build them. The house in question, while not yet finished, has passed all local and IRC foundation, framing, and mechanical inspections and is in strict compliance with local building codes ... AAMOF, it far exceeds them. The construction loan was not a problem, and a mortgage has been obtained.

There is understandably a good deal of ignorance regarding the method, much of it seen in the posts right here, and misconceptions regarding fire, vermin, and mold are common, but just that - misconceptions based on ignorance.

I would not build one for myself, after building one for a client my perception of the construction method has changed to one of provisional acceptance(post and beam, infill, construction, only) providing the owner is prepared for the additional cost.

AAMOF, if I hadn't let the cat out of the bag, the fact that this particular kitchen was destined for a house with straw bale walls, it is doubtful if even the most observant would have guessed from the photos.

As a plus, many of these straw bale homes are downright beautiful artworks themselves, particularly if you are a fan of Southwestern architecture (I'm not, but it is growing on me):

[Lee Michaels]

"Swingman" wrote

WHAT??? You don't like southwestern style architecture????

My wife and I love it. Of course, we spent a weekend together in a southwestern style house in Carlsbad, CA. Sorta fell in love there and got married soon after. That was about 27 years ago. Beautiful house, beautiful relationship, etc.

[Tom Veatch]

1967 Camero Rally Sport - first NEW car my wife and I owned. Easy to work on, power out the ying yang, but a little cramped for a family on the road. Sold it with 120,000 miles on the odometer and in excellent condition. The engine (327) was still tight with good even compression and essentially zero oil consumption. Got more than I paid for it new. Feeding it high octane leaded fuel might be a little inconvenient these days, but wish I still had it.

Tom Veatch Wichita, KS USA

[Martin H. Eastburn]

Decomposes and mold and mildew and rodents to say a few. Yes and I'm told on another show those straw bale homes are failing and won't last for years.

Martin

-MIKE- wrote:

[SteveBell]

I looked into straw bale construction for a garden wall a couple of years ago. Texas was in the middle of a drought at the time, so bales were expensive if you could even find them. The client lived next to a busy street, and she wanted a wall to deaden traffic noise.

Long story short, an eight-foot-tall 90-foot-long straw bale fence would be more than $20,000 dollars. * concrete footer with four-foot re-bar sticking up and galvanized nails sticking down at soil level * straw bales stacked in running bond to eight feet (speared on re-bar) * chicken wire covering bales and cinched to nails in footer * stucco covering all

Trivia for today: Hay and straw bales are the same thing, except hay includes the seed heads.

[Swingman]

Nope ... "hay" has nutritional value and is used for fodder, "straw" very little nutritional value and is primarily used for bedding.

[Lew Hodgett]

-----------------------------------------------------

experienced the junk era in American autos. Our experience from that period to present:

-----------------------------------------------------

I come from the post WWII era.

The world stopped for me with the 50 Merc whose headlights will be remembered by all those who found a use other than driving at night for them

Buick sucked with the change in model years being denoted by how many chrome rings were on each side during the '50s.

Bigger tail fins were the answer for innovative design.

Olds 88 and Olds 98 which was an 88 with a longer trunk.

Ford saved the decade of the '50s with the first thunder chicken.

Too bad they screwed it up.

Never could figure out what made people go gaga for a '57 Chevy.

1960 gave us Detroit's answer to the "Bug", the Corvair from GM and can't remember what Ford and Chrysler called their crap but all were duds.

Had a '65 Ford Fairlane 500 hard top with a 289 and a cable release for the trunk.

I thought I was the cat's ass when I pulled up to the grocery store loading lane and popped the trunk so the kids could load the groceries.

I sold that car when my job included a furnished car, but as far as I know, whoever ended up with it liked the car.

Then came the Muskrat in '64, what a tin can.

The next 50 years were all down hill.

Detroit wouldn't build what people wanted to buy and what they built was crap.

GMs refusal to build a diesel engine line but rather tried to raise the compression of a gasoline engine for the Olds.

It was doomed before you turned the ignition switch.

Detroit did it with their own shovel.

They dug a deep hole and ran right down into it.

Yes we need the talent and the knowledge that id "Detroit", but it will come at a BIG price.

Off the stump.

Lew

[Lew Hodgett]

"Swingman" wote:

Lew

[Leon]

That engine had very little in common with the gasoline engine. No parts were enterchangable except perhaps valve cover bolts. It's biggest most common problem was an inadequate fuel filtering system that did not seperate water from the fuel. Any amount of water that went through the injector pump resulted in a very minimum of damage to the elisticast ring failure inside the pump. From there the water would damage the engine. It was not until 1985, the last year that Oldsmobile used that diesel engine that they finally added a fuel filter system that would keep water out of the injection system. We, the dealership strongly advised every diesel customer to add a better, Racor filter system, to their cars. The V6 diesel engine suffered the same problem and fate.

It would have done much better had only the fuel system been better from the start. GM was arrogent that way, they did not provide the fuel, it was the customers responsibility to find fuel with out water in it. Fat chance!

[Y?]

A strawbale house built in the right place to tested and proven standards (they've been doing it for roughly a hundred years) will show your concerns to be completely baseless. If it's built incorrectly i'm sure it will fail, much like any other construction. What show did you see this on?

I've spent 35 years so far visiting an eccentric aunts bale house and it's never had a single issue. I've been through, over and around another bale house that is solid and intact at 60 years old.

I'm not trying to convince you to build one, in fact i'd prefer you didn't, just giving you another point of view.

Y.

[Lew Hodgett]

I certainly hope not.

Starting with an engine block casting designed for 9.5:1 compression ratio and then milling a few "tenths" off the head and block to approach 20:1 for a diesel.

Let's not even talk about the connecting rods, the crank, the pistons, etc.

It was not only lousy engineering, it approached placing GM on an equal to the flim flam man.

------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------

Anybody who has ever had anything to do with a diesel knows how important fuel filtering is for successful operation.

Along about the time, the small Racor (Which is owned by Parker) was less than $150 installed most places including sailboat engine compartments which are a damn sight more confining than auto engine compartments.

My guess is that even at the highly discounted OEM level, GM was still not interested.

As far as diesel filters were concerned, there is Racor and there is Racor.

They build great products.

-------------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------------

Another fine example of "Detroit" building what people didn't want (Crap that didn't work) for the auto market.

My guess they didn't try that with GM Truck & Coach.

Their customers would have laughed them out of the building.

Bottom line.........................................

That so-called diesel GM offered for the Olds was an hermaphroditic gang bang, not a diesel engine.

BTW, was told the story of how the head of Buick in Flint, where the new diesel was to be built, killed a new engine program solely on cost, by one of my GM contacts at the time.

This guy figured the automotive diesel was just a flash in the pan and would go away as soon as gasoline prices dropped.

Sound familiar?

Lew

[evodawg]

I don't know about the rest of the next 50 years being crap. I loved my 69 Chevelle so much in High School I found another in 1999 and completely restored it. Loving it again but more appreciative this time around.

[Mark & Juanita]

... snip

Umm, no. Straw bales are typically wheat straw after threshing, that much is true. Hay, however, is feed that includes green dried plants such as alfalfa, clover, timothy, bermuda, and other grasses. One can say that grains with the head intact could technically be included as "hay", but I've never heard that usage unless the grain was cut green before fully maturing.

[Mark & Juanita]

That series of engines was nigh unto indestructible -- 327, 350, etc The bodies would fall down around the engines before they failed.

[J. Clarke]

The number of chrome rings has always denoted the number of cylinders--six cylinders had 3 to a side, eights had 4. If the GM 12 ever actually goes into production then no doubt those will have 6 to a side.

Thunderchicken never impressed me all that much--it didn't know what it wanted to be--they tried to make it a Corvette competitor but any random Corvette would kick it's ass, then they tried to make it a luxury car with no back seat to speak of (the one with suicide doors entering into a seat that made an XKE-2+2 look like a Checker Marathon was a riot), then it was just another nondescript car with no character to speak of for a while. If they had just priced it like a Mustang they'd have gained a decade on the industry and sold a zillion of them.

Three little digits. 2-8-3. With fuel injection. And a bottom end that would take enough boost that drag racers could pull more than 1000 horsepower out of it.

Actually the Corvair wasn't a "dud", it was murdered. Corvairs were _beating_ Porsche in European racing, but Ralph Nader, who has never had a driver's license, managed with a series of well publicized lawsuits that he lost and a book entitled "Unsafe at Any Speed" to convince the public that their handling was dangerously inferior to the understeering klunkers that were commonplace in the US at the time. He later tried the same trick on the Beetle, that used the same suspension design, and instead became a laughningstock. The final nail in his coffin as a credible consumer advocate was when he started claiming that disk brakes were a conspiracy to drive up maintenance costs, but by that time the Corvair was gone. But he's still at it, with his shenanigans costing Gore the election a few years back (think _Bush_ "stole the election", it was that damned fool Nader that torpedoed Gore).

Yeah, I saw one of the first ones and at fourteen recognized it as my mother's Falcon with fancy sheet metal. Never understood the appeal.

[Doug Miller]

Likewise the Chrysler slant-six. Had several of those in the 70s and 80s. Just change the oil regularly, and a slant-six will run forever.

[Doug Miller]

Which is sometimes done. When a field is newly seeded with alfalfa, the plants need some protection from the sun for the first two or three months until they're well established. It's common to sow oats along with the alfalfa seed; the oats sprout earlier and grow faster, providing modest shade to the alfalfa seedlings. By the time the alfalfa is ready to cut and bale, the oats have not yet matured and so they get mown green, with immature grain heads, and raked and baled along with the alfalfa. The result is called "oats hay." And if you're planning to store it in a barn for more than a few months, you'd better have a *lot* of cats, because you're going to have a lot of mice. DAMHIKT.

[Jay Pique]

My guess is that it's still a long ways cheaper than the LEED Silver home I just got back from. Isocyenene ain't cheap either.

JP

[dpb]

wrote: ...

Out here in wheat country it's common practice to bale wheat if have had significant hail damage or a late freeze so it won't make enough grain to make worth going to harvest. Or, will also pasture past jointing time with intent of baling for feed to get thru until other feed is available in spring.

Many alternatives but definitely true that "hay" and "straw" aren't the same thing at all...

In essence, straw is the stalk of a fully-ripened plant, the residue left over after threshing as noted above. It has little nutrient value and is totally unpalatable even if it did (think chewing on a straw or toothpick to make a meal).