Something often underestimated in construction is hours of labor. Not just
the actual labor of the digging, sifting and cobbing - but the hours involved in
planning. Work party organization, finding materials, and late nights awake in
bed thinking about project design add up fast. Don't be surprised if your life
is soon revolving around this project. Liz and I met several times just to plan
out our planning. Liz had already created a project timeline, then we set dates
to get materials together, meet with our class instructor for advice, and to
meet at the project site to look over physical design and logistical plans.
Planning is not just essential, but I would argue the most important part of a project. My old boss used to say, "Proper prior preparation prevents pitifully poor performance." Who would want to build half of a project only to find out you have to disassemble the whole thing because you forgot something in the beginning.
In meeting with our instructor and the three of us coordinating together over the internet, Liz and I were able to get important information about how to go about getting our project organized. Part of that was having our class and several other groups of people come to work on our project. Natural building projects are especially great for having educational work parties, or EWP's. Here a group of people, or the project's students, can come and get hands on experience in natural building along with on site lecture material. This has proved to be mutually beneficial. Project coordinators get much needed labor-hours while students are educated about what a specific project will do. Since students help build it they retain a sense of lasting value toward the project. Project coordinators, glad for their help, retain a grateful attitude toward those students.
An educational work party is also a great place for project networking. As we work/learned we heard many people of similar interests ask each other where they might obtain materials for a project they are working on. Also, it's a great place to really get close and dirty with people that you normally wouldn't in a classroom. I had so many wonderful conversations with such pleasant people about appropriate technology (AT) related stuff, and a lot of stuff not related to AT.
The groups that came to work on our project included our Engineering 305 class, the Engineering 114 class, and numerous CCAT volunteers throughout the weeks and especially the Friday volunteers. These groups together put an estimated 300 labor hours into project construction alone.
If you have a group coming to work on your project, excellent planning is necessary to ensure the mutual benefits to take place. Without proper instruction a group can quickly take over the project and do an inaccurate job, and with out high quality training the group could lose interest and perform inadequately or inefficiently.
Click here for some of the information we used to help prepare for our EWP.
Liz developed most of the site specific plans for our oven with the help of the other CCAT co-directors. The other plans for our earth oven were based on the sample oven in the book Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer. This is a thorough and easy to understand book. It is always best to consult several sources for building your own oven, especially people who have built an oven in your area. We had a several experienced oven builders close by to answer our questions. For more detailed instructions on how to build an oven, we suggest you consult a variety of sources especially published paper literature. This site's intention is to give a brief overview of our earthen oven building process, and to address a few of our difficulties.
Let's next take a look a what we're going to need to build an oven at the materials page.