Hello, and welcome back to the latest edition of the Rural Studio Bathhouse blog. As the semester has progressed, so has the Bathhouse, and we are thrilled to share an update!

Right after the last update, we worked on wood modules for the ceiling of the toilet pod. These modules are built the same way as the wall modules, but they will be stacked horizontally to form the ceiling plane. Now all the modules for the toilet pod are completely finished.

Around the same time, we also finalized the material counts for the rest of the steel pieces of the project and sent those over to Jim Turnipseed. Jim ordered them and got them to his shop in Columbiana, Alabama, for us. Again, we are so thankful to Jim for his abundant generosity and support for our project! Not only has Jim been kind enough to provide materials, but he has also provided us with a large working space inside his shop!

During the week of Spring Break, we packed up and headed to Columbiana for a few days to check everything out.

During the first day in the shop, we looked through our drawings with Flo and Luis, the head fabricators in the shop; getting used to the shop and different machinery; and labeling all of our materials for our later convenience.

The rest of the week we started learning how to weld! We began with welding straight lines on plates and then welding two plates together. After getting the hang of things, we found some square tubing in the shop with dimensions similar to the materials we are using for the roof structure. We then practiced welding these pieces together. With a smaller thickness, these pieces were a little harder to weld together, and we had to speed up the welds a little to avoid burning through this material. We got the feel of it and even practiced filling in large gaps or holes that we burned into the material. Flo and Luis also taught us how to grind to clean up welds and materials.

Once we felt comfortable with welding, we worked on the trusses for the outdoor shower. We made our angled cuts on all the pieces for the three trusses. We created a surface to build the trusses on out of two of our walkway channels, and once we laid out one of the trusses, we used small pieces of angles to create a jig so that the other two trusses would match the first.

By the end of the week, we had completely welded one truss! What a fun Spring Break!

Our goal was to finish the outdoor shower as soon as possible but also to stay on schedule on site. With that in mind, Logan and Ashley worked in the shop, while Carla and Ambar kept going on site with modules. They fabricated the two remaining trusses, the frame for the top of the walls, the continuous tubes which the trusses sit on, and several other pieces.

Next, we cleaned and painted everything, then we loaded up all the pieces and brought them back to site.

Once everything was on site, we unstacked the outdoor shower in the Supershed, labeled each module with its orientation and order, and moved the alignment-bracing interior jig (or Abigail as we call her) into place on the slab with the help of some of our peers.

Following that, we got to stacking! With scaffolding around the slab, we added modules layer by layer. After placing each layer, we checked to make sure the addition was level and that the threaded rods aligned with the holes of the modules. It got a little harder to lift the modules onto the stack as we moved up, but the overall process went smoothly.

We were able to fully stack the outdoor shower in one day!

Now that the walls are in place, the frame and roof structure can be craned into place. We will bolt the frame to the threaded rods, compressing and strengthening the walls. And we will bolt the continuous tubes to the frame and weld the trusses to the tubes.

The team also spent a few more days back in the shop learning how to stick weld, so we could do so on site. Although it was fun to learn a new technique, stick welding was much more difficult for us to pick up, and we’ve decided to leave the on-site welding to professionals for now.

We hope our next steps will all follow shortly, and we are very excited to know that the outdoor shower is nearing completion! Once this roof installation is done, we will take everything we’ve learned from the process back with us to the shop to begin fabricating the rest of the roof structure. We will also begin building the walkway frames and start on the shower pod wall modules.

This is such an exciting time in the project, and it is super rewarding to see walls going up and metal coming together. Thank you so much for following along with us and we look forward to providing another exciting update very soon!

–  Rural Studio Bathhouse Team

Carla, Ambar, Ashley, and Logan