The Cob Cottage Company has made the English/Welsh earth building method popular first on the West Coast of the US and has since spread east.
With much experience with this method I have grown increasing interested in another method of building walls with earth. This includes using a CEB(compressed earth block) machine.
You might think this adds more mechanization to the picture, but making cob as a builder includes the use of a skidster or tractor. And it is possible for the low impact owner-builder to make CEB's with a hand powered block compressor.
The advantages to CEB's are that in the NE, we have precious little drying weather and the CEB's are installed when dry. This means they can be made indoors and let dry and then taken to a building site and erected quickly without the need for drying time.
What has really made the idea jump forward for me in terms of how it could become reality is based on a great project called Open Source Ecology founded by Marcin Jakubowski in 2003 and lead by Mark Norton.
One of their first projects in their Global Village Construction Set was the Liberator. They have posted plans and for a machine that can be build by most machinists/welders/builders. You can view the project here.
Anyone interested to help build one?
