How to build your own coral castle

Why build a coral castle?

• Short of creating a lava house, natural stone has a stronger chemical bond than cement or even brick or any other artifical stone. Therefore it is a stronger building material and will last longer, and be more structural.
• Instead of paying for bricks or cement why not get a better building material that is also free. Natural quarried stone on the property. Building a house entirely from sweat equity, instead of needing investment capital and a 30 year loan.
• It will last forever and be a tourist attraction while you live and after you die. And the proceeds can go to charity.
• The house will stay cold in the summer and hot in the winter from the thick heat retentive stone walls.
  
• You can build the structure in such a way to promote natural airflow by having a chimney on top that forces air upward when the wind blows, by use of Bernoulli's principle(fast moving air has lower air pressure).

How to construct a stone castle:

There are many ways to accomplish this, but the root of it all is weight and leverage as Ed Leedskalnin always said. So instead of hauling one bag of cement at a time to build a giant wall of cement you would just move a huge stone wall all at once, but only inches at a time. like Archimedes said "give me a lever long enough and I can move the world".

I have several theories about moving large stones using leverage. One is to have a big "T" shaped crane with a pully chain over the top from one side to the other. On one side you have the stone to be lifted and on the other side you have the counterweight. With a pully system the counterweight is minimal, but it would theoretically work with out pullies even. This crane could move the blocks up and down within 360 degrees of its reach.

Another method is to make the block into a wheel then prop it up and roll it. To make it into a wheel, mark it's center of gravity by balancing the stone on a small rock. See Wally Wallington's experiments into this. You drill a hole into this center of gravity and another hole along the outside of the stone and place a steel pipe in the shape of an "h" in both holes this is the axle and locks the pipe to the stone. To prop up the stone use the Wallington method of putting planks undernieth the stone but to rock it side to side you use a ratchet tie down of industrial strength(high breaking weight) and high leverage. Or just a strong cable and a truckers hitch(also see video for an alternate method). Now if you prop up the stone onto 2 mobile segmented platforms on either side of the stone, then you can roll the blocks along the platform to anywhere you want it, moving the segments at the back of the platform to the front of the platform.

Another way to roll sturdy stones is to put a cable under it then over the top, both ends leading to your position. Then have one end bolted to the ground and the other end as a pully system. This way as you pulled the rope it would roll the stone in the direction intended. But it would also fall on its flat side a lot as it rolled, so it would need to be strong rock. This is a good method of moving long rectangular stones, if you have 2 cables around the stone. A side effect of this method may turn out to be that the heavier stones just slide along the cable and never actually flip over.

But I theorize that for the heavy stones Ed Leedskalnin made "A"-frame legs in a circle around the 30 ton block, protruding out of the rock, and sort of rolled the block on its extended A-frame legs, with a pully system pulling the top of the block to get it rolling slowly. A lever from the center to the top of the block is what the pully would be pulling.

How to cut the rock:

I prefer the simpler method of getting a concrete saw with a diamond faced carbide tip blade and then maybe stone splitting wedges and shims for large blocks. And the machine would be powered by a portable gas powered electric generator. Later as you assemble the rocks you will want to assemble them in the same positions that they were originally cut from the stone. This is how the stones at Machu Picchu were so perfectly aligned so that you're not able to get a piece of paper between them. Because they were assembled in the same orientation that they were quarried.

The roof:

I think based on a show about Machu Picchu that the roofs there were made of wood because all of the roofs are missing pointing to decomposed organic wood roofs. Also the Machu Picchu buildings had "A" shaped walls meaning they had wood beams spanning the roofs. But I don't know how they made it water proof. The good thing about Machu Picchu though is that lots of the stones were small, so you can still make large structures out of small stones.

Windows:

Have a rock beam along the top of the window to hold any rocks above the window. The windows at Machu Picchu were small. You can also make shelving on the inside of the structures walls in this same way with a wall behind the window.