Kiln Day 2, "The mix"

To be ready to pour the pad tomorrow morning we knew we had to have our mix ready to go before hand. We had agreed on the amount needed and found a place just outside of town that would fill up your truck bed for 10 bucks with sand or gravel. Not bad I thought. So for the first part of the morning, Matt drove with Clayton out to get the goods and picked me up to go help shovel it out. Little did we know that our good friend, Scott was so excited about us coming out with the gravel and sand that he went and bought 9 bags of portland cement. Just so you know it's a total rip off to buy premixed concrete..so doing it yourself is always the money savin way to be. The ratio goes like this... 1 portland cement to 2 sand to 3 gravel. 1, 2, 3. This little pad is going to need about 9 bags of portland, just under a cubic yard of sand and just under two cubic yards of gravel. (but don't take my word for it though. i'm workin with professionals here..and maybe i mixed a number up. i'm learning a lot of this stuff as we're doing it- so check it out for yourself!!) It's so great working with people who are so excited about this project. Another great reason to be building at Scott's place is that he has just about every toy and useful piece of equipment we could need to make this experience smoothe. I said he was making this really easy on me and he replied.... "nah Bobby.. I'm just facilitating you... " Check out this sweet tracked hydraulic lift (Scott uses it to haul full logs to his one-man lumber mill) which sure comes in handy when you need to move a cement mixer a couple blocks down a dirt road to where a kiln is being built...

So far...the cost of the kiln is:

sand: $10

gravel: $10

portland cement: $108

total: $128