Building construction utilising applied coatings is well known and has been used around the world for many years and is now becoming more widely used in Australia where brick veneer or weatherboard construction has traditionally been more popular in the housing industry.

One known construction technique which has become popular in Australia is a thermal wall system which uses an insulation board to cover a building frame structure, for example, and then uses an applied coating to cover the insulation board. In many instances the insulation board is cellular polystyrene foam in sheet form which is fixed to the frame structure or to a building internal wall and then covered with an applied coating. The insulation board is generally of a thickness in the range 50-150 mm and is fixed by mechanical fixing means to the building frame or may be glued and mechanically fixed to a building outer wall. The coating is of a thickness up to about 10 mm. The render coating may of course be applied to most building wall surfaces and in some cases is applied over a brick wall.

Application of the applied coating requires a skilled tradesman as it is necessary to achieve a perfectly flat surface in a vertical plane and this requires skill and physical effort on the part of the tradesman. The technique generally used by the tradesman is to apply small pads of the render at spaced locations on the wall surface and to use a string line and levelling bar to level the pads into a flat surface and to also align all the pads in the same plane. Once the pads are dry, narrow render strips are applied to the wall surface to extend between these pads. The strips usually extend vertically, and then once the strips are dry, render is applied to the remainder of the surface and the surface is finished in the plane of the pads.

This is a time-consuming and strenuous task and requires significant skill. The task is best performed by two tradesmen.

An object of this invention is to provide a building component for use with applied coatings to building walls, which component reduces the time and skill required to achieve a uniform surface.

Accordingly, the invention provides a render levelling strip for attachment to a building wall prior to application of a render coating, said strip being an elongate flat strip having a front face and a rear face and bevelled longitudinal edges, each said edge having a fibreglass or plastics, or like mesh extending therefrom to form a wing on each side of said strip.

Preferably said strip is moulded from cement fibre-reinforced light-weight render and said mesh is E-glass mesh.

Preferably said mesh is a single piece which extends through said strip and provides said wings on each side.

Preferably said wings extend along the entire length of the strip.

Preferably said bevelled edges extend outwardly from said front face to said rear face whereby said rear face has a greater area than said front face.

Preferably said longitudinal edges are parallel.

In order that the invention may be more readily understood a particular embodiment will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings wherein: FIGURE 1 is a front perspective view of part of a levelling strip according to the invention; and FIGURE 2 is a front view of a portion of wall to which levelling strips, as shown in FIGURE 1, are attached prior to application of a render coating.

Referring to the drawings the levelling strip according to this embodiment comprises an elongate rectangular strip member 10 formed from cement fibre- reinforced light-weight render which is moulded into the desired shape. The strip member 10 has a front face 11 and a rear face 12 which is not clearly evident in the drawings. The longitudinal edges 13 of the strip are bevelled outwardly from the front face to the rear face whereby the rear face has a greater area than the front face.

A fibreglass mesh 14 in the form of E-glass mesh is moulded into the member 10 and projects from each of the longitudinal edges 13 to form wings which extend along the length of the member at each side. The mesh is arranged in a plane closely adjacent the plane of the rear face 12 whereby it extends from the edges 13 close to the extremity of the bevelled edge. The strip member 10 is manufactured in various lengths and can be cut to the desired length depending on the size of the wall on which it is to be installed.

As shown in FIGURE 2 the strip member 10 is mounted on the face of a wall 15 to which a render coating is to be applied. The strip may be nailed, glued or otherwise attached to the wall surface and a number of strips are spaced over the surface a distance which can be readily bridged by a levelling bar used by a tradesman to finish the render coating. Preferably the members 10 extend in a vertical direction but this is not essential. As will be appreciated, it is necessary to ensure that the front face 11 of all the members on a wall surface are arranged in a common vertical plane and thus it may be necessary to provide some packing (not shown) behind one or more of the members 10 in order to achieve this result.

Once the strip members 10 are fixed to the wall surface, a tradesman is able to apply a render coating in a conventional manner and use the front face 11 of the strip members 10 as a means of finishing the surface of the render coating in a plane coincident with the plane of the front face 11 of each member 10. In other words, the levelling bar is extended between two adjacent members 10 to bear on the front face 11 thereof and the levelling bar is moved over the face of the wall to remove any excess render coating and finish the surface in a uniform plane.

As will be evident the use of the levelling strips of this invention avoids the need to apply small pads of render to the wall surface and adjust the pads to be in a common plane. Therefore, the application of the render coating is more readily facilitated and does not require the skilled labour which has been necessary with the prior art techniques.

It should also be apparent that modifications to the above described embodiment can be readily effected by persons skilled in the art. The levelling strip need not take the exact format described above provided it has a front face which can be arranged co-planar with the front face of adjacent levelling strips. The mesh 14 may be other than fibreglass mesh and need not extend entirely along the length of the levelling strip as shown in the above embodiment. The purpose of the mesh 14 is merely to integrate the levelling strip with the render coating applied to the wall and this could be achieved with small sections of mesh extending from the levelling strip at spaced intervals. Also, the material from which the levelling strip is formed could be varied and need not be the same material as is used in the render coating. The bevelled edge could also be replaced by other edge constructions.