Progress at St. Joseph Church

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.