Here are more pictures of the church we are building in Commerce, TX. We are currently constructing the block wall sections that connect the old church to the new church.  We have finished the walls and the roof on the lobby, and we should finish the block connectors next week.  Click here to see the gallery.

You will hear a lot more about our new Paxis Scaffold in the future on Monolithic.com, but in the meantime I will post some raw video clips.  It’s hard to describe how nice this scaffold is, but with the new drive motors and the 10′ stance, this scaffold makes one of the sturdiest, safest platforms I have ever seen.
  

It has been a very busy couple of weeks for me, and I apologize for not posting these pictures sooner. 

 The new paxis scaffold was a huge success, even though there are a few things that we are going to do differently.  The one thing that we didn’t expect, was that it was so heavy that it started to make some pretty substantial ruts in the ground.  We have been toying around with a few different ideas.  First, I think we will pour a concrete circle in the middle of the dome so that the pivot point and tires have a harder surface to rotate on.  Secondly, I think we will try to find some wider tires for the outside wheels, and change the way the motor is mounted so we have more ground clearance.  

The dome construction went very well.  The foam and rebar hangars were uneventful.  The one thing we did a little differently was hang about a quarter of the steel on the bottom 20′ of the dome, then spray a half inch of concrete.  The reason we sprayed that concrete was to help prevent all of the #6 bars that we had to install on the bottom half, from pulling down on the foam too much.  The weight on the rebar hangars will sometimes cause the rebar hangars to pull away just a little, but it’s enough to make the outside of the dome have pucker marks.  The concrete spraying went well, and the dome looks very nice.

 After we got done spraying the dome, we sprayed the foam on the stem wall.  We started by spraying our Monoform primer onto the wall first, and then spraying two inches of two pound foam.  Now that the dome is done, and the foam is sprayed, we are going to remove our scaffold and let the plumbers and electricians in to do the underground work. 
 Please enjoy the new pictures, and look forward to more blog entries in the future.  

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. 

Again we are making good progress at the St. Joseph Catholic Church in Commerce, Texas.  We finished the blocks last week and started to form the ring beam for the top of the dome.  Despite the rain and concrete pump problems, Javier and crew got the forms finished, installed all the uprights, installed the first strain gauge in the dome, and was able to pour the concrete by Thursday.  I had the crew come home for the rest of the week, because of the cold, so that the beam would have some cure time before inflation.  Click the picture to see more images. 


Related Links:

• St. Joseph Catholic Church Website
• Monolithic Constructors Website
• Mike’s Picture Gallery
• Post: Strain Gauges in St. Joseph Catholic Church

We have been making good progress in Commerce this last week.  The final blocks were layed on Thursday and Javier had already started forming the 10” x 18” concrete ring beam that is going to be poured on top of the wall.  We wrestled over pouring or spraying the ring beam, but then decided that one that big would probably be faster poured than sprayed.  The ring beam will have 5 #6 bars in it, as well as #5 uprights into the dome every 12″.  We expect the ring beam to be poured tomorrow, and inflation to happen on Thursday.  You are all invited, and you can email me for more specific directions.  To see all the pictures, click here.

I am posting some of the raw video from the job in Commerce, Texas.  The plan is to make a video about church construction and using the block stem walls.  Click read more to see the video. Read the rest of this entry »

One of Monolithic’s current projects is the St. Joseph Catholic Church in Commerce, Texas. Only for the last few years have we been building domes with block stem walls, and we really like the way they look. We are about two thirds of the way done now, and we expect to be done with the rest of it by the middle of this week.

We started with a 2′ x 18” footing. Pouring the footing was like any other, but installing the uprights took more care. We had to really try hard to get the uprights spaced correctly so they would fit into the cores. Also, pouring the footing as level as possible is important, since the first courses depend on it.

We spent a long time getting the first course laid so that the rest would fly up. We hired masons to lay the block out, and our men would install the rebar and fill the cores with concrete. The first course we used just a regular 8″ x 16″ knock out block. We bought the knock out blocks because we figured on placing them upside down so that we could move the uprights into the right core. The only problem with that plan was that the masons said that it is against the code to put knock out blocks upside down, so that bombed.

Inside the cores, we put steel every 4 feet horizontal and vertical. The vertical steel was put in the cores after they we filled. Every 4′ high (six courses) we used knock out blocks to put horizontal steel. We filled the cores with our standard eight sack shotcrete mix, and pumped it with our GHP 2500. The next step, that we start this week, will be to form and either pour, or spray the top ring beam. The engineering specs have a 18″ x 10″ ring beam of concrete on top of the brick wall. And I will try to post more pictures sometime this next week.

Be sure to click on the pictures to go to the picture gallery.