Papercreters: [papercreters] The Bad Blocks -was- Re: Greetings from Silver City

Monday, July 21, 2008

[papercreters] The Bad Blocks -was- Re: Greetings from Silver City

Ed:

About the bad blocks.

Do you have pictures of them that you can post?

Do you know the exact mix recipe that was used to make them?

Do you know the process that was used to mix/form/handle them?

How difficult would it be to ship Mikey Sklar a teeny tiny sample of
a block so that he could put it under his newfangled digital
microscope he's been playing with? It would be very interesting to
compare that to other papercrete samples under the microscope.

--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, "Edward Conley" <c_edward@...>
wrote:
>
> Greg,
> The blocks were a big part of the problem.
> First of all, they didn't have enough portland cement in them, then
they were terribly
> irregular and inconsistent. Then many of them had chunks of
unground paper and
> sometimes even Walmart bags in them. When I mentioned my concerns
to the people I
> bought them from, they tried to convince me it didn't matter. It
would be fixed in the
> plastering process.
> Compared to the blocks that Eric Patterson makes, these were grade
b minus at best.
> I estimate I wasted at least $30,000 or more in time and materials
because of the crappy
> blocks. All the while, they were reassuring me that it would all be
remedied with extra
> mortar, which I found out was not true.
> Even the mortar mixture was flawed and could in no way be made to
support the varied
> thickness of blocks as I was led to believe since the paper content
was too high and no
> other materials besides portland cement was added.
> I now realize just how important it is to have at least a basic
understanding of the
> chemestry of papercrete and why some additives work and some
don't,Why the formulas
> are critical to success of the system, and why the blocks do have
to be as even as possible.
> Another mistake was to plaster (papercrete) as the walls were going
up. I would venture to
> say this contributed to heavy cracking because the mortar hadn't
dried sufficently.
> There were many aspects of the project that I was totally ignorant
of and at the mercy of
> the "expert" overseeing the building, and realized that much of
what we were doing was
> experimental in some sense.
> Bottom line, ya gotta have good blocks to begin with.
> Ed
>