Manpower

I was thinking of the name of this blog as I was sitting on the tractor the other day and it seemed like the best answer I could come up with.

In a few of my posts I have written about how Araceli has been designing a two story Office/Observatory and the different parts of construction it has  been in.

Well on Friday it was a big day because we poured the second story slab.

I think I could write a book about everything we had to go through to get this thing done.  It was quite surprising to me all which needed to be coordinated to do a slab.

As we got closer and closer to Friday we (Araceli, the Supervisors and I) went over and over the process and steps it would take to do this.

Why I am stressing the planning part of this I think can be put into better perspective on comparison with the States.

A distant shot of the progress going on

In the States, not everywhere, but on the jobs I have worked on (schools, facilities etc) when they pour the concrete slabs they truck in very large trucks (the ones with a big rotating drum on the back) and then crane a pipe in and pump the concrete through the pipe into the area and spray all the concrete in.  

A fast process.

Unfortunately here we do not have a crane, pump, large truck (with the big rotating drum) or a pipe.

Vibrating the concrete into the steel formwork

So we had to resort to other methods.

We had a concrete mixer on the ground and had to find out a way to transport about 12 cubic meters of concrete up about 6 meters.

So the solution we came up with was to employ our tractor and fill the dumper with concrete and then hoist it up and have guys shovel out the concrete from the dumper and into the formwork......

 Lifting the concrete up to the second story

I have to say that I have never sat on a tractor that long.

We started at 8:30 in the morning and did not stop until 7 pm.  We had no choice.  It was one of those things that once you started you had to see it all the way through.

Araceli up top documenting the process

What I was impressed with was the ability for our workers to continue for all of these hours doing this hard labor.

The "concrete gang" the guys mixing the concrete, main responsibility is to hoist cement, stone and sand into the mixer.  Now each bag of cement is 50 kg.  And the ratio we are using is 1 cement to 2 sand to 3 stone.  There was a total of 65 bags of cement used so you can start imagining the amount of lifting these guys had to do.

Pouring the concrete into the dumper of the tractor

But as they progressed through the day they rotated each position so they would not tire out.

Eventually we finished pouring everything at 7.  Unfortunately for some it was not over.

There were about 5 guys who had to stay around till just before midnight screeding the slab.  In the process of just being poured the water makes its way to the surface.  To maintain a smooth surface the builders had to run a metal float over the concrete surface and smooth it out.

Screeding the slab.  You can see the parts where the water is coming up on the slab

Any experts out there do not get on to me if I missed something or called something the wrong name.

I was impressed with all of these guys for their hard work and endurance to get the job done.  Although they did get a hefty overtime for doing this.

The final product