» News • Media Coverage

THE VANCOUVER SUN
NEW HOME SECTION (Dec 18, 1999)

'Fabric form footings cut costs, save wood...'

The developer of an innovative system for building residential home footings says it's so practical it will eventually replace more conventional methods for making them.

By Barbara McQuade
Staff Reporter

Wood belongs inside a house where you can touch it and admire it, not wasted in footing forms used to shape the concrete footings in the first stages of home construction. That's the view of Surrey inventor Richard Fearn, who says there is a cheaper, better and more labour efficient substitute - fabric.

At 55, Fearn is one of only three people in the world working on various aspects of a new technology known as fabric forming. He has devised a means of adapting the technology into an efficient system for forming concrete footings for residential homes.

His Fastfoot® system took him more than 10 years to perfect. It has been used in constructing about 200 houses around the Lower Mainland, and more than 7,000 in the U.S., mainly in California, he says.

The system uses steel braces and 2-by-4's to hold the fabric form in place. Concrete is poured into the fabric bag and conforms perfectly to uneven ground as it sets. The 2-by-4's or rods are removed once the concrete is set, and can be re-used. The fact that the bagged concrete does conform to uneven ground gives Fastfoot® an advantage over rigid wood that doesn't fit at all well over bumps. "We can guarantee a level footing", says Fearn.

A homeowner never sees the footings in his home. But almost all the structural problems you hear about are usually caused by the footings not being put in properly, Fearn says. The footing distributes the load coming down the wall into the ground. 

The Fastfoot® fabric is woven polyethylene. "A square foot of fabric costs about six cents," Fearn says. "A square foot of lumber is $1.50. Which would you buy?"

That's why he is convinced his technology, which hasn't been used anywhere else in the world yet, will ultimately win out over conventional systems. It doesn't matter what type of wall form the builder chooses, Fastfoot® works with them all, Fearn says.

One of the biggest customers is building modular houses in California. In the U.S., 24 percent of all new housing starts are modular, so the potential is tremendous. It also works with insulated concrete forms, aluminum, plywood or steel wall forms. Customer builder Jerry Boyco of WWW Builders in Anmore has used Fastfoot® in the last four homes he has built and figures he saved about 25 to 30 percent in time and money. He rented the special support frames and hired a special crew familiar with the system. "If my business was bigger and I was building townhouses, I would buy the equipment and use it all the time," he says.

Fearn, who built houses while a student in math and science at UBC, and has been involved with building for most of his life, has put a big investment of time and money into the research and development of Fastfoot®.

Now his company, Fab-Form Industries, has just gone public an is trying to raise funds to promote the product throughout North America. "The Americans love our product, the Canadians are a little more reluctant," he says.

Already the company has 14 dealers in the U.S. and sales are triple what was projected at this stage. "You have to remember we are introducing a new concept," Fearn says. 

"Beyond the fabric and the steel components, we are really selling a new technology."

More information on Fastfoot® is available on the company's website at www.fab-form.com.