Hi,

I'm looking at building a small cabin in a very remote site.  The site  is only accessible by ATV or Side-by-side vehicles.  USFS won't let us take a jeep/truck to the inholding.  We can take many small loads behind a Polaris Ranger, but can't take a truck/jeep/car out there.

I'm pretty well set on building with ICF for several reasons.
I'm curious if anyone has done a remote concrete mix project of any scale?  This would be a 32 x 14' ICF building with two rooms attached.  About 700 sq/ft total.
Footers, walls, etc..

Any ideas/advise/pictures would be appreciated!!

Thanks in advance,

CB.

What kind of distance, 1000 ft, 10 miles? Makes a lot of difference in what approach is feasible. Any restrictions on what kind or size of trailer you can pull in there? Will the USFS allow a small tractor with a footprint no wider than a UTV? How large is your inholding? That will determine how much space you have to stockpile material. How many UTVs can you have up there at one time? One, a dozen, 100? Is the trail/path wide enough to for two vehicles to pass by each other or is strictly single track all the way?

Max UTV vehicle width allowed is 50", so we're looking at a small Polaris Ranger.

Site is about 4mi. from the paved road.  No length restrictions on the trailer.
Will probably get both a bucket/dump trailer, and a flat bed trailer for supplies.

CB.

Note:  I am going to try to get a 2 trip permit to get my mini-excavator (Kubota U45) out there by promising some trail maintenance.

Posted By cbryndal on 21 Oct 2011 02:17 PM
Max UTV vehicle width allowed is 50", so we're looking at a small Polaris Ranger.

Site is about 4mi. from the paved road.  No length restrictions on the trailer.
Will probably get both a bucket/dump trailer, and a flat bed trailer for supplies.

CB.

Not sure, but I suspect a small tractor will pull a lot heavier load than a Ranger will. I'm thinking you may want to explore the feasibility of putting together a convoy. Might make use ready mix possible. Rent every U-Cart available in a 100 mile radius and use them to haul the mix from a truck to the site in a steady round robin hauling session. Wild idea, I know, but something like that might work!

You have plenty of water available? What about restrictions, if any, on washing out concrete carts or trucks?

yeah you are looking at about 11 cubic yards.... this 44500 lb in weight...

6,000 lb of cement
7,100 lb of water
12,200 lb of sand
19,200 lb of gravel

mind you there will be some air in there so this will come out to be a tad bit more than 11 cuyd...


plus rebar, bracing, bucks, tools, people, food

4 mi?

Hire a helichopter with a bucket.

Carrying that much ready-mixed concrete for 4 miles in small vehicles will be a serious task and somewhat slow.  Since access is so limited to the site, maybe another type of construction that is not so time dependent should be considered.  Yes, concrete can contain a chemical to retard setting but will add to the cost.  If you have water on site, then you might want to consider concrete block with site mixed mortar and grout.  If mix water is not available, then think about metal skin SIPS.

Thanks everyone for the replies.

We do have water on site, actually lots of it.

I'm thinking about taking lots of trips of raw materials, them doing some sort of on-site mix.  The alternative is to build out of logs, but I like several of the advantages (over the long run) of ICF construction.

Rgds,

Corey..

BTW-  yes, I've thought about heli's - it's a matter of cost.  If we can bird in 2-3 trips of material, it may make sense.  If it's a lot of flight time it's probably out of the budget.

K, just double-checked distances. Looks like 2.6mi. Part of it is a decommissioned jeep road, part is jeep in woods trail. All has been re-apportioned into a USFS ATV/UTV trail to the site. I'll look into the tractor idea. Will need to see if they make them narrow enough but still with decent power. A front bucket vehicle would be very helpful.

Posted By cbryndal on 21 Oct 2011 10:41 PM
I'll look into the tractor idea. Will need to see if they make them narrow enough but still with decent power. A front bucket vehicle would be very helpful.

Small Bobcat for on-site work may be an option. They come as small as the operator stands on a platform on the backside with no cab. Actually, I think it's doable if you have plenty of room to stockpile all your material ahead of time and have the time frame available to do it without busting your butt and totally neglecting everything else about life while you work on it. After all, the Egyptians built the pyramids with only human and animal labor. It just takes time, and ingenuity.

BTW- yes, I've thought about heli's - it's a matter of cost. If we can bird in 2-3 trips of material, it may make sense. If it's a lot of flight time it's probably out of the budget.

Buckets are a yard or a yard and a half. Rates are probably $1600 - $2600/hr. Flight time from loading point to construction site is very small as well as time to fill the bucket, so it is all about time to place it in the form, and, or course, positioning legs to and from base. How fast can you place a yard and half in your forms?

If you think about the time, fuel and materials necessary to transport material for 11 yards of concrete, it could even out quickly.

And, maybe more importantly, have you ever mixed 11 yards with a portable mixer before? 20 tons of materiel loaded into the mixer and then, 20 tons of mud removed, all by hand. Even if you just dump it out, you still have to move 20 tons to the top of your forms.....

pre-placed aggregate with grout tubes installed.
Manual grout pump and rich, very easy to pump structural grout
Aggregate is probably onsite--especially since you suggested you have lots of water close. That either means a creek or river with gravel bar and means to wash the gravel or it means a lake with a beach with the same.
portland based cement is not the only kind of cement in the world either. You might look at either a binder that utilizes what is probably onsite or a resin binder that can be hauled in in small amounts as it takes so much less and comes in a five gallon bucket.
I would scrap the conventional footing and go with what was done for centuries before readymix became prevalent (rubble/trench done with onsite matrerials and augmented with gabions if site conditions dictate the need)
I would also consider what we did in the bush in Alaska and that is chemical caison done insitu or helical piers--both methods which can provide superior results to a spread footing and can be done by hand labour with little if any site prep and grading work. I am currently on a job in South America which is 20 miles from the nearest road--if you can even call it a road -- and has two major rivers to cross with a cable and boatswain's chair.

I would use SCIPs over ICF - 1/2 the concrete, less foam volume (unless you have collapsible ICF blocks) and no materials needed to cover the inside or outside surfaces. Don't do footers - use a frost protected shallow foundation it the site is flat. Perhaps steel SIPs for the roof.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you need a concrete pump and an industrial size compressor to do SCIPS, hardly something you would want to haul 2.6 miles. Use 4" icf get youself some Helix fiber and get rid of most of the rebar, also use some of the Fritz-Pax products and build a suspended insulated floor.  If you can get a knock down block the better.  I would recommend Fox 1440.  It cames in plastic wrap with the webs in boxes

SCIPs can be done with stucco sprayers. You can't use large aggregate size- it would need be essentially a high cement-ratio mortar, but this is done all the time. (They're even hand-trowel applied in the 3rd world.) To be sure it has to be an order of magnitude slower going with a small to mid-sized stucco sprayer than full-on shot-crete pump, but if speed were critical you'd be doing the heli approach, eh? ;-)

Lots of great ideas - thanks everyone!

I'm working on designing the building, so once we have an idea of the volumes of concrete required I'll know what I'm really dealing with.
It will be a simple rectangle (or 2) with a lean-to, and a 12:12 pitch roof.  I plan to timber-frame the roof with beams cut from on-site standing-dead logs.

It is possible to get a small pull behind cement mixer to the site, although I agree this may be like mixing teaspoons of material.  Also, we will certainly have generator power available.  Water is supplied by a lake on the property, and a nearby river.  We need to be careful not to egress any material (dissolved or other) back into the water system.  Another idea was to take the concrete material out the site in the winter on a trailer behind a snowcat, and then begin construction in the spring.

With a heli only taking 1-2 yards per lift, this may prove expensive.  Although, I agree it may be well worth it.  We'd probably bring the mixer trucks up to the trail head and transfer from mix truck to heli there, and avoid the 20mi heli-run back to the batch plant.  We'll see.... sure would be epic!

Thanks everyone for the ideas - pls keep em coming!

CB.

Attached is a picture of the lake.  10,500ft above Sea Level.  Here's the view out the (future) front door.

Posted By cbryndal on 26 Oct 2011 12:14 AM

Attached is a picture of the lake.  10,500ft above Sea Level.  Here's the view out the (future) front door.

Pretty view! But I just have to relate what Frank Lloyd Wright told the Kaufman's, of furniture retail fame in Pittsburgh, about Falling Water. That's an all concrete home he designed and built for them in Pennsylvania over a creek. Mrs. Kaufman wanted the house set back to one side so the creek could be seen from inside the home. Wright said no. He built the house smack dab over the creek so the creek is not visible at all anywhere from inside the house, but the sound of it could be heard from anywhere in the house. He told Mrs. Kaufman that if he built the house where she suggested, so they could see the creek from  inside, it would not be long when they would no longer really see the creek because it would be so ever present. By making it so that you had to leave the house, even if just on the stairway to nowhere suspended above the water, the beauty of the creek would never become stale.

Considering the mold, leaks and structural problems, I wouldn't refer to Falling Water for anything.

A snowcat in the winter sounds good from a capacity and environmental impact standpoint.

Ha!

Well,  unfortunately we don't have the option of putting the cabin in (over) the lake.  That's USFS land, as is the river/creek below.
Falling water is an amazing project, although it has taken incredible re-construction & maintenance over the years - the concept is very novel!

My hope is to frame the view of the lake from the living room & bedroom and keep the foot/traffic path in the back of the house and away from the lake.

With the snowcat we can move relatively large amounts of material rather easily.  So, we could get tons of sacks of concrete, gravel, etc  back therer, but there still is that problem of mixing only a few bags at a time, and running out of daylight...

CB.