We made our first step with the rebar for our “shell” today.  There are a lot of bends to get around the perimeter, but once we got started, it got easier.

We did have some help though.

Ryan Knott of RK Concrete, generously loaned us his bench rebar bender.  It makes accurate and repetitive bends with very little effort.  I can’t imagine making all the angles we need with a manual one.

Thanks Ryan!

We do need to make some manual adjustments with a “Hickey Bar” but it’s fairly simple and just takes a bit of muscle.  Who needs that gym membership anyway.

One of the perfect 90 degree bends done with the electric bender.

You may have noticed the green zip ties in the picture above.  In a previous posting I showed that I was making my own stainless steel ties out of discarded wire from the local utility company.  In theory, the idea of recycling the wire for this use is appealing. However, I did a little calculating and figured we would need around 5000 zip ties.  It takes me about 15 seconds to make one.  That’s 75,000 seconds, or 1,250 hours to make all I would need.  Though I will use the several hundred ties that I made,  It is much more practical to buy what we need.