Barrel Tiled Shed & Tiled Roof Hut – Primitive Technology

How do you create a fire and rain proof work shed when you only have what’s available to you in an Australian forest? Primitive Technology takes on the challenge in this Barrel Tiled Shed video. Some details from his description:

To make the tiles, clay was collected and had the sticks and stones taken out of it. Then I crushed up old broken pottery and tiles I made before which I mixed with the clays as grog (stops clay from cracking). A tile frame was made from a split piece of lawyer cane bent into a trapezoidal shape about 50 cm long, 20 cm at the wide end and 16 cm at the narrow end. This was put on a flat stone. Wood ash was put down to stop the clay sticking to the rock. The clay was pressed into the fame and the wet tile was slid onto a curved piece of wood to form the curved shape of the barrel tile. The tile was then moved immediately to a flat area and the piece of wood was slid out so the tile sat on the ground to dry. Being curved, air could get under the tile to help dry it out.

I could make 30 tiles easily in a day and only had 150 to make. But it kept raining and destroying the tiles before they dried. So I had to make 30 tiles, let them dry enough to be moved, then take them to the tiled hut where they were force dried on the ondol (fire heated bed). The majority of the time spent on this project was re-making broken tiles due to unseasonal rain (I don’t think we have a proper dry season here anymore, this is what held up my other tiled hut too). So this whole part probably took 4 weeks.

Firing the tiles was easy compared to the other tiled hut I built. I could fit 30 tiles in the kiln at once and had 150 tiles to fire. The 5 firings took 5, 4.5, 3.5, 4.5 and 3.5 hours. The first one probably took longer due to the kiln not being dry yet and the 4th firing took a while due to wet firewood. Tiling the roof was also easy. Starting at one end, tiles were laid so that the concavity faced up and the narrow end pointed into the next tile below acting like a shoot for water to run down. The gaps between these tiles was covered using a tile with the concavity facing down and the narrow end pointing up under the next tile above. The ridge of the hut was covered with the same tiles interlocking to keep rain out. The low roof pitch, the weight and friction of the tiles, the fact that they interlock all help to keep the tiles in place meaning they don’t need tabs or pegs to hold them in place.

For a tiled roof with walls, check out his 2015 Tiled Roof Hut:

Watch more Primitive Technology vids on this site.