The unseen Hero.......Well....One of them.

It's probably underneath your feet right now.  It's in most buildings.  Our unseen hero is re-bar.  Re-bar is a metal rod that is used to help strengthen cement.  Our new building has about 2 tons of it in the foundation.  This is just a picture blog showing all the re-bar we've bent, cut and put together to make the various pads (or mattes) for the foundations of our building.  There are also a few pictures of other 'unsung' hero's of our building project.  With out our maintenance staff we won't even have footings yet

This would be a matte.  A bunch of re-bar put together in a grid.  This specific size of matte we had to make 44 of.  

Not to be confused with matte,  this is Larry.  Not the re-bar,  but the guy in the blue shirt.  Larry was one of our crew that was blessed with the job of cutting and placing the rods in a grid.  They are then twisted together with a kind of Industrial twist tie.   

After a few times we decided to make a jig to place the rods in.  This made the process a lot quicker.  This is Dave.  He and Jackie spent a few nights in the shop after work putting these together.    

This is Jackie doing more twisting.  

More twisting

    Next is a few pictures of the actual re-bar in place.  All the work that goes into these mattes and towers and they just get covered with cement in the end.  It's a Shame.

This is a tower.  It's tied to the Footer (which is at the bottom) with those twisty ties.  This re-bar will help keep this tower strong when the wieght of the building is eventually sitting on top of it.  

The next few pictures are of the mattes.  Each wider spot in the footer is where a tower or pylon will be.  These will be what the building sits on.  That's why it's so important to have our unseen hero in the cement.  

just keep pouring, just keep pouring, just keep pouring pouring pouring. What do we do....We pour.

It's Offical,  we have half of the foundation/walls done!  The past week our maintanence crew has been working long and hard to get our first half of the building foundation/walls poured.  This will be a mini journal of all the steps we took to get a poured wall on top of the Footers that we had poured last week.

  The panel looking things here are called forms.  These are what our crew will use to form (go figure that's what the do) the cement into a wall.  You could liken them to the pail that we all loved to use as kids to make little walls of sand at the beach.  These are just bigger and instead of sand,  we use cement.

Here is a picture of some of our SAU students helping us out.  They are here with their 'Intro to Christian Camping" class for 'J' Term.  There were 4 groups of 3 or 4 students that took turns experiencing each department of Michindoh.  It's only fitting that the Maintenance part of that be pouring cement.  

For More information about SAU you can visit thier website at Arbor.edu.

    This is the East foundation wall all formed and ready for pouring.  As you can see it's near perfectly straight.  One of the hardest, and most important,  parts about setting the foundations is making sure they are square and straight.  If the wall is off by even a little bit,  there is a chance we would have to re-pour the wall.  We didn't want to re-pour the wall,  so we made sure to get it right the first time.  

Unfortunately, we didn't get any up close pictures of the wall being poured.  This is a picture as our crew is finishing up the first half of the wall.  

  This is a great picture of the freshly poured wall.  You may think "well, now it's done".  Not really.  Now our crew has to cover the cement so it doesn't cure to quickly.  One of the problems with pouring in the winter is the cold.  If the Cement freezes is can cause cracks in the foundation.  We all know that we need a firm foundation to build anything on.  In order to keep the cement warm our crew had to cover it and then heat it.  

Here you can see our home-brewed roofs that were made a few weeks ago.  Because we have some pretty gaping holes on the edge of these roofs the heat still was getting out.  So we decided to use the fly's from our summer camp miner's tents.  They seemed to do the trick.  

Just another picture of them tucking the cement in for the night.  We did have heaters that we call salamanders underneath the tarps.  They are capable of producing 250,000 BTU's each.  The great and crazy thing is that we didn't even fire them up.  The Cement produced enough heat on it's own to keep it nice and toasty under it's bedding.  

This is a picture before we put the roofs on.  The Contractor that will be putting up the building came out and set the anchor bolts for the building's truss work.  We felt much more comfortable letting them do it then trying to do it our self.  These bolts will be used to secure the frame of the building to its foundation.  

  Another rewind moment......  This is a picture of two of our crew helping to pour the pylons or towers in the middle of the building.  Each one of these 3' square towers sits on about 7' square footings. We showed a picture of them in the last post.  Both chunks of cement are held together by the unseen hero of our foundations,  the re-bar. 

Making sure this building won't float away....

         As we've mentioned already,  our maintenance crew has taken on the responsibility of pouring the foundations for the new building.  Today they started pouring the first half of the building footers.  Footers are the cement that the foundation sets on.  For just half of the building they called in 4 cement trucks.

This is the foundation for the North west wall footers.  The larger spots are  where the towers will be.  The towers are what the metal beams of the building sit on.  

These are a couple of our maintenance crew screeting (or smoothing) out the cement as the truck  pours it.  

This is Dave, our general contractor and head of maintenance   he is working on setting  vertical pieces of re-bar in the wet cement for the wall that will be sitting on top of this footer.  

You can see where the re-bar is sticking out oft he cement.  That is where the walls of the new gym will be.  

  By the end of the day we also hope to have the footers for the pylons poured.  The pylons are where the internal beams of the building will set.  they will be holding a significant amount of weight.  To help support and distribute that weight the footers are connected to those pylons by re-bar.

Here you can see 5 big holes in the ground.  These are where the pylons will be.  At the bottom of this picture you can see one of the forms (pieces of wood designed to form the cement) in the hole.  

Here you can see the re-bar that is used to reinforce the footer for the pylon.  By the end of the day all 5 of these will be filled with cement.  Each one of these footers is about 4 and half feet square.  

Special Delivery!

      We have a few very exciting things that have happened within the last week or so!   The first is that the maintenance crew has begun digging the holes for the foundations.  The two weeks before that some of them were part of a team that built 'roofs' for the foundation ground.  The hope for these roofs is help trap the heat in the ground so we could continue to dig.  They also help keep the snow out of the holes and, when the time comes,  keep the cement warmer.  

Here is the side view of one of the roofs.  Our maintenance crew was excited to find out they actually kept the ground warm enough to dig!  In the foreground you can see the lip of the trench for our foundations. 

Here is our crew working on digging the trenches.  We're using the old Dump truck to haul the excavated sand to one of our shops to store it so it doesn't freeze.  Once we get the foundations/Pylons  in, we can use that sand to back fill the holes.  

This looks familiar doesn't it?   Here you can see where we are going to be digging the trenches for the foundation.  

    The Most exciting news is that the steel for our building has Arrived!   It may not look like much, but it's here.  Now we just need to get the foundations and pylons in and we will have a building!  

This is one side of the hilltop hall Parking lot.  Most of what you see here is either Re-bar (for reinforcing the cement) or the metal that will go on the out side of the building.  

This is the other side of the parking lot.  All you see here is the steal structure that will hold the entire building up.  It's so exciting!  

   We will continue to keep this updated and hope to soon have pictures of a frame!