Cast Earth was developed especially for building large projects rapidly using large amounts of relatively heavy equipment.

What if a client wants only a small segment of Cast Earth in order to incorporate this beautiful material in an existing facility or to add to the interest of a garden or similar feature?

Such requests can be accommodated easily if there is a large job to be done nearby, so the equipment can be taken to the small job before or after the main project to quickly finish the little segment. Unfortunately, the small projects to date have not been timed to coincide with larger work.

In such cases, the little job will be done with low output equipment and the labor cost per unit volume of Cast Earth will be high. Clients are willing to tolerate the high unit cost since they are much more interested in the beauty of the project than its expense.

Here is just such a project in Phoenix. It is an ornamental wall in the front yard of the home of architect Douglas McCord and his wife Carolyn of M Studio.

This was a Mountain Earth Technologies project using small, rented equipment illustrated below:

Even at the low rate, this was a suitable solution to the mixing requirement. Placing was done with the same skid steer loader used to feed soil and calcined gypsum to the Jr. Mix. In once case, this same system was used on somewhat larger job.

In another small wall (image to come), a large mobile mixer was used since although not operating on a large job, it was near the small project's site. For very small quantities, it would be feasible to use even a hoe and wheelbarrow mixing configuration. When small amounts of Cast Earth have been used for floors, a typical 1/3 to 1/2 yd. concrete mixer has been used. The mix technology lends itself to many ways of production.

In building the Cast Earth prototypes in Boulder City, NV in 1993 and 1995, alternate mechanized equipment was employed. The first Cast Earth wall was poured with a gypsum floor underlayment placer. When the small prototype building was poured, a full scale commercial ReadyMix truck operating in conjunction with a concrete batch plant filled with soil and calcined gypsum was very effective and would have allowed a vast amount of construction to be done very accurately and rapidly; only the small structure was planned, however.

(In the longer term and on large projects, the ReadyMix truck/batch plant will probably take a major role, but batch plant operators will need to become motivated to install dispensing equipment for soil and calcined gypsum since most are not as interested in making something other than concrete as were the operators in Boulder City.)

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