Buffelshoek Trust. Acorn to Oaks

 An exiting new project for Rammteck with finance from the Buffelshoek Trust. These new buildings will form part of the staff housing for Acorn to Oaks School.

We have followed our traditional model of hiring staff from the local communities, to be trained and construct the buildings for us.



The people from the local community that turned up for the interviews.



We hired 26 new staff and were ready to start when the first hurdle arrived.
This was the engineer who decided a platform was necessary to level the site for 
run off.



This little process from start to finish lost us a full 3 months, 2 weeks for the engineer and two and a half months for the earthworks.


While the staff waited for the platform to be completed they built a guard house using the new knowledge they had acquired from our training program.


Guard house


The earthworks people still at work and we started laying out the site.

All the reinforcing cages being made for the foundations with the unstable soil. 

Trenches where dug. One day per building then cages installed.




Once the reinforcing was in, we started pouring foundations. When doing foundations try and complete the process in one day.

Once foundations are cast we start installing shutters for the plinth walls, these walls are the connection points for our rammed earth to the foundations.


Once all plinth walls are done we start back filling and compacting the backfill in layers no thicker than 150 mm this will form the base of the slab.

So backfill completed we installed a damp coarse layer and rienforcing mesh as well as all the conduits for the plugs and then cast the slab 

With a completed slab in record time we have started ramming and the soil that we are using is giving fantastic results. The colors are really stark and earthy at the same time










On the third day the walls where complete on the first section of ramming 














We have now closed for the Christmas holidays and will return on the 7 th January 2013

Happy holidays to all 

Mike










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