Thread: Building a wooden house with dovetails - a video

Here is a video of the factory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TICDir9htqg

Imagine this! Pull up to a local plantation and burp out prefabricated housing with only a few machines.

Saw mills could make the components directly!

Crikey those blokes were quick workers!
Very interesting concept, and I love watching machinery producing finished goods from raw materials.

Thanks for posting.

Alan...

What a great idea and the shavings from the machines get used for insulation. Australia misses out on a lot of these sorts of modern building methods, we have no innovation at all.

Quite an interesting concept on building a house. I think I would enjoy making one of these.

Looks good, but no fitting of electrical cables or plumbing.
Not sure how the insulation would affect any power cables that might be installed in the walls.

I'm a residential carpenter/builder, I run a framing crew. This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. This is so inferior to standard framing that I am mildly furious that it exists.
For one it uses way more material, exterior sheathing on a typical exterior wall is 7/16" OSB, the stock they are using above looks to be 7/8" or 5/4". It also looks as though the bastardized studs with dovetails are run on an 8" layout, instead of 16" or 24". Add to that the interior walls are sheathed with wood instead of drywall which adds to material cost. So in terms of just raw wood used in walls this build uses at least twice as much as standard wood framing. You might say its faster since you have a finished wood exterior on this build, vs needing to side on a conventional, but guess what, unless you put a vapor barrier on the exterior that wood is gonna be completely and totally ed inside and out in a very short time.
Next, sawdust as insulation...where to start...I can't tell if the worst aspect of the idea is the mold, the insects, the flammability, or the plain and simple fact that to generate that much sawdust you're either carting it to the site from the lumber mill or sending some asshole out in the woods with a belt sander and wishing him good luck. Pink fiberglass is pretty flame retardant, so is drywall, so is standard framing with fire stopping between cavities, floors, and attic areas. Fiberglass also traps much less water, so less mold issues, and I'm pretty sure nothing on this planet can eat fiberglass or drywall so insects aren't as much of an issue either. Even if you don't want to use fiberglass there are tons of cheap materials that would be far far superior to sawdust. If this idea were your standard level of idiotic this might be the worst aspect of the design. But the stupid dial has been turned up to 11, so it gets worse.
I don't mess with plumbing, but I've pulled wires and installed lights and plugs. I can't imagine how you'd run wire in this mess. I've gotta believe they are pulling wires as they proceed with framing, instead of after, which means you need two separate trades coordinating simultaneously on the same wall. Add plumbing and HVAC, which would likely have to go in simultaneously as well, and you've created a cluster pissing contest of trades all trying to hack their into a complex wall that they won't have easy access to later if something was to be wrong, which something inevitably will. Building is all about coordinating different trades, getting machines and materials where they need to be when they need to be there, communicating changes, scheduling. This build is inefficient, inefficient is expensive.
Lastly, and what irritates me most is how painfully, stupidly, ridiculously slow this would be. An 8 foot wide by 8 foot tall wall on a regular house is gonna have 7 studs, a bottom plate, and one or two top plates depending if its stack framing. All that will be covered in two 4' by 8' sheets of plywood and some tyvec on one side, and two sheets of 4' by 8' drywall on the other. That is 13 or 14 different pieces of material total for one normal wall. For an 8 by 8 wall on this build, a face is sheathed in 24" by 8" inch boards, so that'd be 32 pieces, 64 to sheath both sides, then there'd be 78 of the bastardized stud things, for 142 total pieces. This thing has ten times as many boards as a normal wall. Add to that the guy in rubber gloves painting mystery and I'm calling shenanigans. Basically, give me a slab the same area as that house, with the same windows and doors, give me a circular saw, a nail gun, tape measure, pencil, hammer, chalk line, speed square, knife and some nails and I alone could frame the entire place faster than it took this group of four or five miserable bastards.
So, to sum up, this wall is more flammable, less resistant to mold and insects, more difficult to build, requires more materials in general, the cost of those materials is higher on average, it's much more complex, and it takes longer to build. What is the advantage?...I mean why, just why? This thing transcends the plains of stupidity and reaches beyond the precipices of moronic into the clouds of completely and totally ed . It's like if a bunch of bad ideas had a giant orgy, then the offspring from that orgy incestuously reproduced for a couple generations, this is the dumbest kid at that family reunion.

Not my rebuttal, but convincing enough that I now think its a silly idea.

Must admit that while I wouldn't put it in quite as incandescent language, I had many of the same thoughts as the 'residential carpenter'. I was struck by how labour-intensive making all those components appears to be - so many done one bit a at a time! Apart from the few metal fixings, the entire structure is termite tucker. And over the 5 days it takes to put your lego house together, you better pray hard for fine weather. If it rains, them-there dovetails are going to get a little harder to drive home!

Cheers,

I was thinking about this quite a bit.

My father is a builder and architect, brother a carpenter. They both said the same.... "good food for termites and mice".

When you watch the second video on how they are made, its far from an automated industrial process. Its all hand done and extremely laborious.

So, services aside (plumbing, electricity), I was thinking about how this technique could be useful in other ways.

Perhaps it can be modified to build outdoor structures with pallets?

Imagine, if you would, using one of FenceFurnitures air-powered pallet dismantlers (Nail Kicker V20 Pneumatic Denailers), a pile of decent pallets and a machine to route the dovetails (or a bunch of jigs and a router).

You could make sheds, outdoor boxes, storage areas, etc.

Originally Posted by IanW

And over the 5 days it takes to put your lego house together, you better pray hard for fine weather. If it rains, them-there dovetails are going to get a little harder to drive home!

Cheers,

If that happened the possibility is that the wall would expand upwards .

Rob