When in Crete, do as the other Cretins do…
It’s amazing how sometimes surfing leads you to interesting ideas that you’ve never had before. Like the mention of slashdot of pykrete, a combination of 14% wood pulp and water, which is frozen together to make blocks. During WWII, the British had a bold plan to build aircraft carriers several thousand feet long and capable of carrying 200 Spitfires and long range bombers.
Anyway, I found this to be interesting, but of no real practical use.
Surprisingly though, while perusing comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, somebody mentioned that they were experimenting with padobe. What’s padobe? A form of
adobe that utilizes waste paper. It turns out that people are making various
slurries of water, paper, and cement and using them as inexpensive building
materials for home construction. I’ve been interested in alternative home building techniques for a while, but hadn’t heard of this construction technique.
I rather like the idea of do-it-yourself home construction using renewable and/or
waste materials, and some of the resulting homes are pretty amazing.
Nifty stuff. If you start at papercrete.com, you’ll get some ideas.