Horizontal Footer Rebar Finished

It was a busy week after the footer rebar arrived. We finished all the horizontal rebar for the footer in just 3 days! If you look close you can see how crazy the rebar is inside the forms.

It took us 3 very long work days over the Labor Day weekend. We rushed to set ourselves up to pour the footer this week before hurricane Dorian makes its way up the east coast. We will be getting just rain from the storm but no one is sure how much rain. Now that the rebar is in the forms there is no way to dig out silt if more washes in. Well.... there is a way but I don't even want to think about it....

The impending hurricane has spurred us into furious action! We got straight to work trying to piece together the giant puzzle of rebar.

I think we deserve a giant pat on the back for figuring it out. It was confusing because many pieces were one off parts somewhere in the pile of rebar. They were originally all labeled but during shipping and unloading many of the tags were pulled off. We did succeed and it mostly looks like the plans.

The start of the process was actually the whole week before the long weekend. Most of the pre-bent pieces that were sent to us needed further modification to fit correctly and we did not have the tools to modify them. We had to buy a rebar bender/cutter. This took a few days to get to us since we couldn't find one locally. We also needed a bender to make the large sweeping curves around the dome. This ended up being a trial and error build project. In the best of worlds we would have made this prior to the rebar arriving but we didn't....  

1. We thought the rebar supplier was going to do all the big sweeping curves for us. They did a few for us but for some reason stopped doing it. The ones they did send us were actually not curved enough so we had to bend them more anyway.
2. We didn't have any rebar to use in a prototype

These two reasons had us just hanging in the air for a few days after the rebar arrived. Our first bending prototype failed....badly. I don't even have a photo of it. We went shopping for wheels locally at a bunch of different places including the dump. One idea was to find old riding lawn mowers and take the metal wheels that the belts go in to drive the blades. We were unsuccessful in finding old lawn mowers or any other old metal wheels. The only wheels we could find locally at the store were replacement plastic/rubber wheels (from push lawn mowers) or castors for carts and chairs. We decided on the plastic ones with rubber. We thought the rubber would be a good thing. Those wheels were no match for the #5 thirty foot lengths of rebar we needed to bend. The amount of force on them was clearly crushing them. Prototype #2 was successful because we ordered metal heavy duty shop cart wheels normally used in garages. This of course also took a few days for them to arrive via Amazon but we had our prototype up and running by Friday night before the long weekend.

We did take video of how it works but I will make a separate post dedicated to this contraption once we get the video uploaded. Mr. Dometastic is quite proud of it even if it doesn't look like much. It seems to be holding up well to the pressures of bending the #5 rebar. I would even venture to say it is starting to be easier to use now that it has broken in a bit. It still takes 2 people to pull/push the rebar through but it is easier now that the wheels have worn away to the shape of the rebar.

Now for the bad news.....
The rebar shop was supposed to deliver the rebar yesterday for the stem wall but they are backlogged. At the earliest we might get it Friday. This delivery includes a few missing pieces for the footer and the rebar needed to temporarily support all the vertical pieces during the footer pour. We are not going to be able to pour before the hurricane goes by. We are super worried that we will have the ridiculous job of hand digging silt out of the forms with tiny shovels. The kiddie shovels are a joke...but there is some truth to it. We will be forced to use tiny gardening shovels.

We had one extra rebar left over to use for temporary support and it will get reused in the stem wall. This photo shows how it will work. The verticles are 12" apart in most places with 2 sections were they are 6" apart. We have to place them in prior to pouring as it would be impossible without an army of helpers to put them in during the pour.

Last but not least, the drone is back in action after its trip back to the manufacturer to be repaired. Mr. Dometastic made a short fly over around the footer to show all the rebar in more detail. CLICK HERE to watch it.

Now we wait and hope that the hurricane and all the other storms miss us until we get this thing poured. My ideal weekend does not involve tiny shovels.