contour line is pretty darn useful. It allows to you build foundations for houses, catch and store water and nutrients in swales or swale pathways, make fantastic walking tracks across steep hillsides and numerous other fantastically functional things. We’ve just been teaching 3 different ways (high tech and low-fi) you can find and mark contour lines to our Permaculture Design Course students and thought we’d share them with you too…
The Bunyip Level (aka the water level)
Caroline and Nysha learning the ways of the bunyip
Firstly, I have no idea how the bunyip level earned this name, if you know I’d love to hear from you. This handy tool consists of two posts and a hose connecting them meaning it’s either free or dirt cheap to make. On each of the upright timber posts are measurements showing up to 1 metre off the ground. This means you can match the water line against the numbers at both ends of the hose, ensuring you have the same level. We added some yellow food dye into the hose so you can see the water line more clearly, however this was a bad colour choice as it inspires thoughts of urine…. Will choose a different colour next time. You can make your own so easily at home, watch Brad Lancaster’s video about how and check out all his other work, when it comes to water harvesting he’s one of the best.
The hose can be varying lengths, this one is approximately 10 metres which allows you to mark out short or long areas and move around corners or structures. One thing you do have to watch out for is making sure that you hold the post perfectly upright. To help, you could hold a spirit level against the post to make sure it’s vertical (instead of leaning to one side) so you get an accurate reading. This is a minor, yet crucial detail in creating successful contours.
We’ve used the bunyip level a lot of our own place for creating swale pathways amongst our vegetable gardens, they work a treat.The A-frame
Todd calibrating the A-frame
The A-frame consists of three sticks, a length of string and a weight to hold the string down – we’ve used a big heavy bolt for this particular one. When making your own, the key thing to remember is to make the distance between the legs a desirable length, 1m or 2m generally works well as it helps you keep track of distance. You can see a step-by-step guide to making, calibrating and using an A-frame here, all filmed to a thumping techno sound-track… But don’t worry, you can turn the sound down. The guys on this short film are using nails to join the timber pieces together, I’d actually recommend using screws, bolts or just some strong lashing as nails have a tendency to pop out sooner rather than later.
The A-frame in action, you can see the short sticks in the ground marking the actual contour line.
The Laser Level
The laser level is the high tech option which can get fairly pricey (depending on how much you’re willing to spend), however you can also hire them by the day. Currently this is what we do when we need it for big jobs as it’s super quick to mark out large areas with one person and when you’re working with an earth moving machine it’s easy to check or tweak levels as earth is being moved. It consists of a tripod with a ‘computer head’ (not the proper term… obviously) on top which projects a laser light to the height of your choice and a long, retractable measuring stick with an electronic reader on it which picks up the laser light coming from the tripod.
June marking out a contour on our current part-time Permaculture Design Course, 2014
The laser level can be used across long distances by one person and is super quick to get accurate contour lines marked out quick smart.
Can’t remember! We’ve used many brands over the years 🙂