Friday 10 August 2007

[Progress.028] Slab almost ready, waiting for concrete tomorrow

This morning, we finally have 3 trades person working on site, the waffle pods are been nicely stacked up like LEGO.

From a higher angle, you can see the waffle pods are been evenly laid all over the place, with the black plastic layer at the bottom. This guy is using a saw to cut out some irregular shapes.

I can now see the signs on one of those bags been left at the front yesterday, it says "One Steel Reinforcing" "com2540", don't know what is it...

Thanks to powerful Google, have a quick search and found this PDF file, even the prices are included! So this is call "Bar Chair".

From the same PDF file, I also found the name of the black plastic thing, it's called "Polythene Building Film".

And of course, how can I forget the most important "Waffle Pod", there's even a diagram showing you how it should be placed.

And I think that grey coloured thing is the "4 way spacer", placed around the waffle pods so that they can be nicely laid one by one with equal distance in between. This photo shows the waffle pods for the garage are actually thinner and you can see the steel beams been placed on the spacers.

This guy is actually walking on top of the waffle pods, so I guess may be it is quite strong...

2 other photos taken this morning.


I also found this page from Smorgon Steel Reinforcing which has a step-by-step guide for the construction of the waffle pod system(they call it "Waffle Raft Slab System"), you can have a look if you are interested.

When I checked again around 8:30pm, all the slab setup are done. We were told that tomorrow the concrete pump guys will be here to pump the concrete and our slab will be finished!

Just checked the weather forecast, Tuesday is going to be a raining day, so our slab will have a mixed of dry/wet days in the coming week for it to dry slowly and nicely...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Allan
did you upgrade steel mesh to SL82? looks like your steel mesh is quite strong. Did you just use their standard concrete and standard steel mesh? I was thinking of upgrading concrete and steel mesh as I don't see crack in the slab.
thanks as always

BuildingOurFirstHouse said...

Hi David,

No, we just use whatever the builder provided. Never thought of upgrading the steel mesh and this is the first time I ever heard of that term "SL82".

Just googled it and was quite amazed to see so many different types of steel mesh available...

Not 100% sure, but heard people saying cracks on slab has something to do with how fast it dry/cure?? Remember our supervisor mentioned that he sprayed some sort of chemical on top or something like that for it to cure properly (can't remmber if it's faster or slower?).

Hope this helps!