Has anyone built a tire-bale retaining wall? We love the way ours turned out! We used 1/2 bales for this retaining wall. We wrapped wire around large rocks, and attached the other end to the bale cables, to use as "deadmen". Once back-filled, the rocks prevent the wall from ever moving forward. It took a day to stack all these 1/2 bales, tie-off the deadmen, and backfill. I had a friend, a retired large equipment mover, position the bales with a skid steer, while I wired the deadmen, and he backfilled. This is just a small section of the wall, probably about 1/4 of the 50 foot wall. The bales were filled in with plastic bottles and trays, to fill in the gaps. Then a coat of adobe/portland cement mixture (10:1) was applied, filling all gaps, and covering all tires. On top of that, we used about a 3/4" coat of concrete - the green bag of Quickcrete. I did all the mixing, and my wife did all the applications, with gloved hands (no trowel). She also constructed some chicken wire coils and other shapes to add some artistic touches to the design. My wife applied a different combination of stains. The two of us could adobe about 10 linear feet in a day in about 4 hours (we're not Spring chickens). We could concrete-coat about double that. The steps are all stone, with silver quartz flagstone on top, with concrete in the gaps (also stained).
Car tyres? Won't they be wobbly and perhaps weak to hold up a cement render? Does look good though. Unusual.
Here's a picture of a full bale. We used these in the construction of our home as well. The full bale is 5'x5'x2-1/2' high. They weigh about 1 ton each. In the words of a fellow tire-bale house builder - "They ain't going anywhere!". Between the house, and the retaining wall, we used about 20,000 tires.
Are you in the UK? Or in the middle of Arizona (USA)? That truck trailer looks American as does the landscape.
Awesome. I was speaking to some American folk today at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum beside Cultra. Which transports you back in time a few centuries to how rural people in Ireland lived and built their homes. Quite fascinating. Car tyres though didn't feature much in their construction methods.
These tyres are bound with steel wire/cable? Hopefully rust-proof? Silly Q - these isn't any risk of these cables corroding and snapping allowing some unintentional but exciting earth-moving?
The bales are double-bound with galvanized cables. I believe it's #4 or #6 gage. We often picked up the bales, by grabbing the cables, and they wouldn't snap - that's a ton. With all that, and covered in the ground, this is very, very unlikely. This retaining wall will stand long, long after one made of wood, even treated.
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