As you may have surmised from my previous whiny posts, I have been dreading starting the bond beam. It requires me to climb up and down the scaffolding gluing the AAC walls of the beam, tying the steel (rebar) and actually pouring the concrete in the cavity. The main reason I have been dreading the project is that the bond beam needs to be pretty close to perfectly level
so the wooden plate can be bolted to it and the trusses affixed thereto. A top plate that is not perfectly level will make putting the roof on a nightmare. I have laid awake at night trying to figure out the best way to adjust any leveling error I have made in my previous 12 courses of block laying.
Today Alexis helped me pull a string (with a line level attached) from corner to corner on each wall to see how close my efforts were to being level. Happily, I'm very close to level on all three walls except in a couple of spots where I'll have to rasp down the side wall of the bond beam just a hair (approx 1/4"). Additionally, we pulled a tape on all three walls with these results: the west wall was 1/4" short in 26 feet, the east wall was PERFECT (26') and the long north
wall was 1/8" short in 56 feet. I was pretty pleased to say the least. It made me feel MUCH better about "gettin' it done!"... starting tomorrow morning.
Here is a mocked-up close-up of what the bond beam will look like before I pour in the concrete (over/under rebar to form a concrete "I" beam, vertical "J" bolt to bolt the 2" X 8" wooden top plate to, two 2" X 4" X 24" AAC side walls glued to the top course of blocks creating a cavity which will be filled with a loose mixture of concrete.
The duct tape on the tip of the "J" bolt will keep concrete off the threads so that the nut can be torqued down on the wooden top plate easily.
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