prologue

Prologue

Relocated old photographs and drawings have finally become numerous enough to make this manual about house building. Many are copies which have gradually come to light over the last several decades. Most of the originals were lost in a series of natural disasters which occurred during the monsoons of 1995, in California. Life-long friends and family have provided enough material to assemble a manual which has been planned for over thirty years. Should you discover a few useful nuggets of insight here-in, compliment a friend; true friends do surprisingly nice things, often when one least expects it.

One problem with waiting so long to work on a project is much happens in the interim; the pure subject grows broader from life experience. Interconnectedness between ferrocement house building and, say, nuclear power, is made evident to greater or lessor degree depending on life experiences which require time to pass. Those who wake up in the morning pondering our relationship with the gargantuan black hole at the center of the Milky Way probably won't be surprised by the intellectual meanderings which have not been removed from the text. Everyone else is urged to skim the text and look at the pictures; they are arranged to present a foundation for an idea under construction.

Economics Omega Three could have been the title for this manual, but, economics is a subject that causes people's eyes to drift toward daydreams; even less people might have read it than using the present title. Econ 1A is the first economics course taught in most central north american colleges.

Econ Omega 3 is the analytical framework in this ferrocement construction manual because of the ideas that arise around a home that pays for itself more than once per generation. The ferrocement home does this through almost zero maintenance costs and the insurance savings which accrue to a structure that cannot be hurt by earthquake, fire, hurricane, rot, or termites. Econ Ω3 will be explored more completely in future versions of the manual.

Though there are many specific construction details presented in this manual, other complete discussions about some of the same subjects can be found in the ferrocement.com manual Construction of Ferrocement Tanks. That manual, like this one, reads like a cook book and is good to have in hand during actual construction of any structure.

Ferrocement.com prints manuals when inventory reaches zero. A mathematical fact of publishing is that total pages must be divisible by four. This means that some versions of manuals which are still being worked on will have blank spots. This manual and the research publications of the Ferrocement.com Roof Laboratory are both works in process; some drafts are more obvious than others. Perhaps another manual on sculpture will be added to this list some day. Only the tank construction manuals are in finale finished form.