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Expert German-English translation available; business and finance our specialty.

Sachverständige Deutsch-Englische Übersetzung; Geschäft und Finanz unser Spezialgebiet.



Wednesday, October 05, 2005

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE RANCH; BUILDING WITH ADOBE
Wednesday, 05 October 2005


With the ranch’s normal “population” thinned out by “outbounds” (Cindy with kids, Dutch and Alex all gone to Cindy’s “Planet Earth Project”; Bob gone to town on business; Simon on vacation at a fiesta), things remain pretty quiet at Rancho el Nogal. The river was high for a few days after the heavy Hurricane Otis-spawned thunder storms. Despite some cloud, however, no rain last night and today’s internet satellite picture shows no cloud at all around the whole of northern Mexico and southwestern U.S.A. Kathleen and I have been doing small household jobs, preparing meals, and writing.

The new ranch family headed by Bill and Terry have fit right in and keep busy all day. Terry and Jeannie have been working with Tanner on her pony & sulky training and, in Tanner’s absence this week, have been working on the harness and sulky as well as training the pony. Progress is good and the pony is really good at obeying voice commands.

The big job at present, of course, is to get the bulldozer dug out and back on the road. At present it is hung up precariously on trees, logs and rocks some two-thirds of the way down the 60-foot (roughly 20 metres) steep ravine. Bill and Joe are working on it. The first job is to prop up the dozer using logs so they can get underneath it and dig without the machine rolling over onto them. The props are to be made of logs from nearby trees.

A lot of time is wasted because the small pickups are either out of gas, have no batteries, are flat tires, or cannot cross the river at the ford without getting the starter or carburettor wet. This means a lot of hiking back and forth. Then the two chainsaws here refuse to work probably because, in the past, the wrong fuel-to-oil mixture has been used and the spark plugs and ignition system are now totally gummed up. Moreover, we are out of gasoline. Bill spent several hours late yesterday trying to get the chainsaws going. He finally gave up and this morning he and Joe took an axe out with them. Of course, it needed sharpening first.

At present we are waiting for Bob to return from town with jerry cans of fresh, clean gasoline along with a backup tank of propane, drums of diesel fuel for the machinery, spark plugs, carburettor cleaner, and some more food and provisions.

He was expected back last night. But around noon yesterday a horseman rides up from about three hours away with a written message that Bob and Simon have to be in Guerrera tomorrow (06Sep05). Since Simon has the week off and has disappeared to a fiesta in Maycoba, I think, assuming of course that Bob actually received the message I emailed to him, he will have an interesting time rounding up Simon, who may be letting his hair down quite thoroughly. Ah, life on a remote ranch!

Bill is a trained electrician and has passed on lot of his knowledge to his 19-year-old son, Joe. In addition to the heavy dozer work, t he two of them have been working to rewire the solar electrical system. The 12-volt lights inside the ranchhouse are now much, much brighter.

Since the typical building material around this part of rural (and often urban as well) Mexico is adobe I have been doing a little research on the subject. There are a lot of sites where you can get information – and thank goodness for internet access at the ranch! This quote comes from www.greenhousbuilding.com.

Adobe

Adobe is one of the oldest building materials in use. It is basically just dirt that has been moistened with water, sometimes with chopped straw or other fibers added for strength, and then allowed to dry in the desired shape. Commonly adobe is shaped into uniform blocks that can be stacked like bricks to form walls, but it can also be simply piled up over time to create a structure. The best adobe soil will have between 15% and 30% clay in it to bind the material together, with the rest being mostly sand or larger aggregate. Too much clay will shrink and crack excessively; too little will allow fragmentation. Sometimes adobe is stabilized with a small amount of cement or asphalt emulsion added to keep it intact where it will be subject to excessive weather. Adobe blocks can be formed either by pouring it into molds and allowing it to dry or it can be pressed into blocks with a hydraulic or leverage press. Adobe can also be used for floors that have resilience and beauty, colored with a thin slip of clay and polished with natural oil.
Adobe buildings that have substantial eaves to protect the walls and foundations to keep the adobe off the ground will require less maintenance than if the walls are left unprotected. Some adobe buildings have been plastered with Portland cement on the outside in an attempt to protect the adobe, but this practice has led to failures when moisture finds a way through a crack in the cement and then can't readily evaporate. When adobe is used as an exterior plaster it is either stabilized or replastered on a regular basis.


Adobe is a good thermal mass material, holding heat and cool well. It does not insulate very well, so walls made of adobe need some means of providing insulation to maintain comfort in the building. Sometimes this is accomplished by creating a double wall, with an air space, or some other insulation in between. Another approach is placing insulating materials on the outside.

Every building at the ranch but the log cabin where Simon, the hired cowboy lives, and the sheet-metal outhouse are built of adobe. The ranch has been settled for over 100 years but I am not sure how old the hacienda is. The big ranchhouse is much bigger. The newest buildings are the guest house, where Kathleen and I live, and two houses about 30 minutes from here up river. One is a bunkhouse that is currently occupied by the new ranch family, and a house that Bob’s daughter is building.

Once one has decided on adobe and found a site with the right mix of clay and sand, the actual process is fairly easy. Working steadily, you can make between 300 and 500 bricks a day, depending upon how experienced you are. Windows, doors, floors and roofing all have to be decided upon. Windows and doors can be as many or few as you wish and either industrially made or fashioned of un-planed planks, as most of them are here at Rancho el Nogal. Around here it is not as cold as farther north but well-fitting doors and windows will keep you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. Having lots of windows on the south side means better solar warming in the winter. There are still some split-shingle rooves on the original hacienda building. But corrugated metal over pine pole rafters seem to be the roofing material of choice here. The newer stuff works quite well, some of the older corrugated iron is pretty rusty and probably in need of replacement. Certainly the high winds in the recent rain squalls were trying to rip the older roofs off.

I think it would be great fun to design and build an adobe house on Rancho el Nogal. In quiet moments I am mentally working through some ideas. It would be small to start with and have southern exposure to catch the warm rays and to take advantage of the view across the river valley. The roof might be corrugated iron but would have some sort of insulation. The walls would also be insulated somehow. If the north side was without windows, that would be all right too. The foundation would be stone and the floor would be adobe with a coat of cement and oiled with boiled linseed oil. A lot of things would be built in of adobe, like a window bench, perhaps a bed. We are used to oil lamps on the boat and we are also used to going to bed when it gets dark or reading by flashlight. Eventually one could have solar power; we bought used ones from E-Bay for about 1US$ 180 each last year for the boat. The solar power is necessary so we can operate the computer and the wifi system. Internet access definitely makes Rancho el Nogal seem much, much less remote. The furnishing would be “southwestern”, i.e. Indian blankets, baskets, etc. These are just play ideas. But you never know.

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