Wall Casting
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This Webpage is dedicated to my good friend Ron VanderZanden
who recently died in a motorcycle accident.

A casted pumice-crete well house (foreground)
which I recently helped to construct.

For many years I have been researching the concept
of casting walls directly in place.

This appears to me to be the most efficient way to build
homes especially when you are talking about wide walls and larger homes.

Casting opens up new possibilities in terms of design since you are no longer limited to building boxes and straight walls.

Casting uses less wood than conventional (frame) construction.

Unfortunately some casting mixes have problems such as sever cracking, excessive shrinkage and low R-value.

However... a few years back I met a guy who built his home by casting the walls using a homemade mix.

The mix is proprietary for the time being, but, I will say that it involves using a natural waste product and my gut feeling is that the walls probably have a reasonably high R-value. It is also inert, fire proof and non-toxic.

It may even be possible to use it as roof insulation , but, it is very heavy in the casting stage.

It is also possible to cast blocks out of the stuff.
Think about this - you could cast blocks in your backyard on weekday evenings and, once they dry enough to handle, truck them to the building site on weekends. In a few weeks your walls would be up !

We have spent many evenings discussing the mixes and the casting principal in general and are now moving towards getting this mix approved for construction, at least in New Mexico.

In the mean time... we built Donna's house (shown below) out of Pumice-Crete which has been in use in New Mexico for more than 20 years and is, therefore, well known by C.I.D. who approves construction plans in New Mexico.

The R-value for Pumice-Crete is disputable, but, it falls in a range somewhere between 0.8 and 1.5 per inch.

It also has substantial mass for solar heat storage.

We have begun work on a booklette which will explain residential construction using the casting concept. It will outline most aspects of home-construction, but, the focus will be on wall casting.

Another thought we are entertaining is producing a video for the owner-builder showing the construction of a cast house from the ground-up.

E-mail me if you are interested in a copy.
(There is an E-mail link is at the bottom of this page.)

I am very excited about wall casting and I believe that Casting will be the wave of the future in residential construction.

Below are two photos of a casted home.

2003 Project:
Donna's Pumice-Crete House

=	And this is what you get.

Progress !!!

To learn more about wall casting
contact LX&R Design.

Here are a few LX&R designs
in the works for casting:

Zia 6

Emerald City

Axial6G

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