With just two weekends left before our scheduled shotcrete date, Jeff and I were very busy.  We had hoped to finish off the North entrance and thus be done with all the forming but we fell a bit short of that goal..  The long Labor Day weekend is coming up so we are confident that we can get everything ready in time.

One of the challenges was joining the North entrance arch with the main structure.  There are no adjoining  steel I-beams to run the forms from.   I attached a guide to the rebar to run a hot knife foam cutter. This made a fairly clean cut where the two arches meet.

The North entrance is a much tighter radius arch than the rest of the house. While the one inch foam boards are fairly flexible, it was difficult getting them to curve around the arch without cracking.  We ended up putting strips of Duct Tape on the back sides to reinforce them.

We also spent some time running conduit through the foam where they needed to come in through the shell.  We used a different type of hot knife that was basically a stiff wire on a wand, perfect for making small round holes in the foam.

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