Recent content by Iowa Mark

What you are asking for will be difficult to do consistently. Concrete is a poreous material. The staining is caused because of the soak in of the spill, You will need to seal the concrete completely to keep any staining from spills. We used to spray on multiple coats of "boiled" linseed oil on...

It sounds like you are forming pilasters in a gap in a stacked block wall? The problem on pours like this is, they usually get filled up all at once so that the concrete is exerting all of it's hydraulic pressure against the formwork as you run the ******** in and out of that stack of mud. That...

The size of the plywood isn't the issue. It is the stress put on the formwork that is the problem. Most wooden concrete forming is done with a good quality solid core plywood or straight grained two by planking, supported by additional backer bracing secured to cross ties that transfer the...

I've gotten into the habit of turning on my headlight after dark. :willy_nil

My barn.

With a 20' span and a 2x8 lower cord you almost have all the strength without any trussing above. The price of the lumber is going to be more than a standard factory built 2x4 truss with almost 0 deflection across that 20 feet. As has been stated before, there are many plans online with enough...

A couple of years ago I was reroofing our barn. 45 squares of 2x stripping, tin, trim, screws, and various extras bought at our local Menards. At the end I needed two more lengths of trim metal, so I head down to the store to get it. "Sorry, but we will have to special order that since it's late...

Looks a lot like my old Waterloo.

Every time I see one of those garage floors that look like an entrance to 5 star hotel or a WPA federal building, I have to question whether any real work gets done there. Most of the time you can't even see much of my shop floor because of the parts, tools and machinery all over it. Any lazyboy...

Are you sure they are tiles, or concrete just poured over another concrete floor below it? If that was a tractor dealership, the floor might have been damaged and stained up to the point that a new floor was used to cover it. Maybe the tile look was because of it's new usage rather than as a...

You could plywood the vertical walls upstairs creating a pair of beams to help transfer the roof load and new floor load to the end walls.

As the ground freezes, the moisture in it expands. Since it can't, for the most part, travel laterally, it move vertically. If you place your supports down below the frost line (footings) the frost is not under them to drive things up and slides along the sides of the foundation walls. If the...

Thanks for one of the funniest threads I've read in a long time.

Keep some of the rods with the flux knocked off for filler rods. For those big gaps.

It will depend, a great deal, on what is under the slab. I have a 16' x 20' outbuilding that sits on an 18" gravel base with a perimeter thickened edge, rebar and stranded reinforcing mixed into the concrete. It was not sawed and still is without a crack from frost heave. The place where I work...