I built a 20 ton pneumatic-over-hydraulic CEB press a few years ago, out of a $220
Chinese shop press and an $80 pneumatically actuated hydraulic bottle jack with an
integral air stepper motor to make the hydraulic portion work. Made the block form out of
3/8" steel with a 1" thick steel pressing platten- there's some benefit to being next to a
scrap metal yard. You can crank out a block every thirty seconds without having to crank
down on anything, and the materials cost was way less than $550, even after reinforcing
the Chinese press and adding a pair of 5 ton pneumatic-over-hydraulic rams to lift the
200 pound steel form off of the CEB.
Been thinking of using it with papercrete because PC block would still be light enough to
not really constitute much of a falling hazard if you get hit by a wall of them during a
quake, or they could have rebar driven through them. More interested in the stronger and
faster construction concept of ferro-papercrete, however.
Technical note to Pepper: using a slurry made of the same adobe mix as the blocks DOES
NOT MEAN that it welds them together into a solid wall of the same material. A
compressed earth block is not going to absorb enough of that weak solution slurry to act
as anything except mortar, which means you still have a massively heavy wall that's brittle
as heck. This is why tens of thousands die during quakes in Pakistan and Iran, etc. It's
not the fault of mud brick alone, the same can be applied to the red bricks we use in the
states--its just that Georgia and Tennessee don't have too many earthquakes. I'm in
Arizona in an area which has a big one every 100 years or so, and we're due.
The main advantage of a block press for CEB is that of being able to make blocks of
uniform size not because you can put a thin slip bond of slurry that cannot penetrate a
massively compressed block and call THAT your advantage. The advantage in uniformly
composed blocks is that you can dry stack them, and then surface bond them which from
an engineering standpoint is massively stronger than a mortar joint plus you get the
advantage of speed of construction: one man can dry stack a wall that would take an
average two man team a week to mortar into place. Surface bonding provides a much
greater bonding area, and on two surfaces which sandwich the blocks between them
instead of the relatively weak bond of the reduced area of contact between the vertical
area of contact between blocks. Mortar is the weak link in a block wall, unless it is a single
coat across the face of the building in which case you have a tremendous bonding area
and surface that makes the wall exceedingly more cohesive as a unit, especially if both
faces are surface bonded. In US building trades, this is attained usually by adding chopped
fiber glass to the surface bond mix, or affixing metal mesh to the faces of the building to
give the surface bonding solution something of a ferro-cement quality, reinforcing it with
steel as is done in foundations or poured walls.
--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, "pepperh" <pepperh@...> wrote:
>
> Using a slurry made of the same adobe mix as the blocks, means that it welds them
together into a solid wall of the same material. Why introduce a different material?
>
> Pepper
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