After the walls have been stuffed and shaped, the clay slip is sprayed onto the walls with a stipple hopper attached to an air compressor. Clay slip is a mixture of bagged clay and water. This step saves time and labour over some more common plaster methods.
After the large gaps between the corners of the straw bales have been stuffing with dry straw, the walls need to be stuffed with light clay straw and shaped with a lancelot tool to create a relatively flat surface on which to apply the plaster.
Rather than laboriously tossing clay slip with straw by hand to make light clay straw for finishing the stuffing of the bale walls, we used this mixer to speed up the process. We could mix large batches of light clay straw in a short amount of time as well as maintain a consistent amount of clay and moisture on the straw.