Saturday, February 27, 2010

Up To Date Projects

We have several projects currently going in their final stages as well as almost complete. Firstly we have the bamboo paneling done on the residence in the Bangalore urban center. That was completed with our urban team here in Bangalore. The parts were made in our Nagpur building site and then transported and assembled in Bangalore at our job site. The is increasing our ability to do pre-fabrication. We will expand on our capacities to do pre-fab as our infrastructure increases it's ability to manage the operations and resources. We learn as we go here, and our strength as a cooperative is to continually expand our comfort zone to take on more projects.

We are happy to report that the bamboo waterless toilet has gotten it's
wall up and is now standing up on its own. All that we need now, is the mud on the walls or cement, we are still deciding, and then we can put up the roof. We are going to be putting a cement slab on the top of the waterless toilet so mimic the roofs we have seen in the rural villages. There people can store wood, food for drying, and several other materials. This can also be used to go on top of and have a nice place to look out onto. We might even test the ability to have a green roof, full of vegetation that will absorb the rich nutrients of the human waste. There will be some trial and error in this process. We shall see how well this works.

As we can see in the pictures, the framing and infill is pretty much complete except with some final touches on the frame connections.
The open web trusses on the top of the structure will have inserted smaller trusses that will be able to hold the cement slab up. The extentions of the truss expand down onto the wall and hold it right on the line with the structural system. As we can see in the photo that the metal connections at the bottom secure the structure to the cement foundation.

And with the Belgaum node we are happy to have a nice shipment of bamboo being taken to our Nagpur site to start working on our other projects that have large spanning arches and need to be tested over and over again. We have noted in the past blog entries that our collaboration with Geo Tech Industries will bring fruitful results that keep our progress on track.

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