Papercreters: [papercreters] Re: Heat curing papercrete appears to improve tensile strength.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

[papercreters] Re: Heat curing papercrete appears to improve tensile strength.

Having made blocks out of both newspaper and heavy cardboard, I fail to see the aversion most people have to using cardboard as pulp. If soaked thoroughly it pulps well in a McCain style tow mixer, just takes longer than newprint. The fibers are very strong in cardboard and the pieces are somewhat bigger than pulp made with newspapers. This seems to me that they would bind the blocks better than smaller pieces of the newspaper pulp. It is analagous to the difference between particle board and OSB board, or waferwood panels as they are called in some quarters. Particle board being made of small pieces of wood fiber is not nearly as strong as OSB which is made from bigger chunks of wood. Maybe this doesn't translate over to PC the same way, but I think it would. I made a batch of blocks with just cardboard pulp and they are very strong even without any clay or cement to act as binder.

--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, Ron Richter <ronerichter@...> wrote:
>
> Slurryguy wrote:
> "I can imagine creating something like an oversized Pasta Roller that
> could roll-compress a long flat board as a clapboard. A layer of slurry
> could be spread evenly on a long piece of window screen and compressed through the roller. The press might also have a wood grain texture in the top roller to give the clapboard an attractive surface
> texture. Heat curing them in a large solar wood kiln type structure
> might work well."
>
> It froze here this AM and the last three days have been rain @ 45 degrees so I have only gotten one batch of bricks made in the last month. They are still wet enough that I don't feel comfortable putting them in the wall yet. You mention window screen. I don't have a smooth spot (desert, big flat lot of bare sand, edge of highway or county road) around for making lots of bricks. So this year I built a frame 4' square and covered it with hardware cloth (1/4"). I also built a press with an 8"X21" base with a tall handle so I could stand on it. At this point I might put in "see pictures posted" but unfortunately I left my cord at the house in Alaska, so that will have to wait till the first week in August when I go back for the "show" part of this tell.
>
> Anyway the screen may have worked. It is hard to watch how much water is coming out from underneath the screen when you are standing on the top of the press. What I do know is that the 1/4" mesh size may be too small. As I mentioned the bricks made are 4 -5 days old and still green (not what I expected by the way) and the residue on the screen was cured PC (papercrete) and none on the ground. It took 10 min. of spraying with the pressure washer to get it ready for the next batch. So maybe "screen door" material is too small. I am even contemplating going to 3/8" to see if I can get more water out.
>
> Another factor, that I just thought about was that this batch was a test batch of the worst kind of paper to use as a raw material; cardboard boxes and National Geographic magazines. I will try another batch today of REAL paper and see what a difference it makes.
>
> I had built a couple of hot houses for pumpkin and watermelon as individual plant houses (5'X6' and 8'X8'). I am going to drag one of them out and put the bricks in there to see if I can cure them faster. Supposed to get up to 85 today so inside this it might get pretty hot. I'll stick a thermocouple in there occasionally to see how hot it gets.
>
> Ron
>
>
>
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