Rubber Tire Building

Rubber tire building TIRES/WHEELS New Uses 11-1-22 Old car tires make great building blocks when combined with concrete according to a Ruffin, S. C., farmer who came up with a way to use-tires for building and made a storage shed using the technique. Essentially what Halbert Dantzler did was to build forms for concrete walls and then fill the walls with old tires, stacking them on their sides. Then he poured concrete into the forms, submerging the tires. "It makes a strong, thick wall that requires less than half the concrete you'd need to make a wall without the tires. And, this wall will last longer without deterioration because of the strength of the tires holding them together," says Dantzler, who has accumulated a stack of some 200,000 discarded tires on his farm. To build his shed, Dantzler first poured a footing at the base of the proposed walls of the building. Above the footings he built wall forms, which he says should be an inch or so wider than the diameter of the tires you're planning to use. (He used 13-in. car tires which are about 28 in. in dia., so his walls are 30 to 32 in. wide.) Then he stacked the tires inside the wall forms flat on their sides with every other row overlapping. Then he poured in the concrete. "If you order the cement a little wetter than normal it'll find its own level and fill every hole and crack on its own without packing," says Dantzler, who poured 6-ft. high walls for his storage walls on top of which he anchored the roof. For more information, contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Halbert O. Dantzler, Rt. 1, Box 621, Ruffin, S.C. 29475 (ph 803 866-2141).

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