St. Joseph Catholic Church Inflation
Posted by mjsouth on February 2, 2008
After an extremely windy day of attaching the airform yesterday, Javier and his crew had the dome ready to inflate by the next morning. This church is using a copper colored airform that looks great with the limestone colored stem wall. We started the inflation at 9:30, and at 9:40 it was all done. Father George and a handful of the parishioners came out to see the dome inflate.
In the picture gallery you will notice the dome has kind of an egg shape. On the next pictures, you will see the dome round out a lot more. Patterning the airforms is something that has taken us a lot of years to perfect, and it is interesting how we have to pattern them in a weird shape, so that when it’s been inflated for a day and done stretching, it will be the desired shape.
Now that the dome is inflated, Javier is going to finish building our new Paxis Scaffold. The next step is to mask off the uprights. The uprights are the pieces of rebar that extend from the wall, and will be tied into the dome’s structural steel. Once the steel is in place, and the electrical is installed into the shell, then we can start spraying concrete. We expect to start spraying foam on Friday. You can see more pictures of the inflation here.
