Down in Lower Alabama here, in the humid subtropical climate. I'm still a member of this group, but haven't worked with technically papercrete (if there is such a thing) for a good while. I pulp the paper, then mix it with a clay slurry and asphalt emulsion. The test blocks I did with the papercrete were 'one bag' and 'two bag' mixes--I filled up my stock tank mixer with magazines, newspapers, office paper and a few pizza boxes, added water, some yard dirt (mostly sand) with either one bag of cement or two. It dried very well in the summer months, for all the humidity we have. The temperature seemed to be the deciding factor that determined the rate of drying. I didn't make any in the winter; by that time, I'd figured I couldn't use the straight papercrete for what I wanted to do.
The problem I had was mold. Of course, the papercrete blocks absorbed all the rain that hit them, although they did dry out between rains and held up remarkably well. I put the asphalt emulsion in with the papercrete to make it waterproof, then came upon Jack Bay's information and went with that, using the mixer to just pulp the paper and water and let it damp dry before using it in place of cellulose or hammermilled cardboard that Bays called for.
I was in New Mexico a number of years ago and people out there were adding plaster to hurry the setting of their mixes. They claimed it helped, and it did appear to be setting up quicker than mine ever did, but the climate out there is so different than what we have on the Gulf Coast. (Mike McCain was building a house, and the blocks felt a lot like concrete. Another guy was making blocks with just paper, dirt and water and they were holding up great.) The people who were mixing the plaster in with their papercrete had discussed using chopped sheetrock from construction sites and demolition sites, which I thought was a good idea if they could figure out a way to seperate all the nails and wood pieces. Is the sheetrock plaster?
Jack Bays added sawdust, wood chips and bits of wood to his mixes. First he soaked them in a mixture of water and asphalt emulsion. I think that the asphalt emulsion coated the wood and, that way, it didn't absorb water from the mix. I believe you could do the same with the wood in papercrete. I wonder if you could coat the glass pieces some people are working with, with the watered down asphalt? Lord knows it sticks to anything. The bad thing about coating the wood is that you have to shake it while it's drying to keep it from clumping together. Part of the beauty of papercrete, though, was the light weight. What does the glass do to that?
Another thing that I found was that I needed to put sand in the mix to keep the blocks from cracking. At the time, I wanted a lighter block but mine had to have sand. I wished I'd had a cheaper source of pumice. I didn't have a place out of the sun to dry my blocks, either. When I was working with pottery, the method of drying affected the ware, and I always wondered if the blocks were allowed to dry at a controlled rate, if they would crack.
All in all, I think that you could use papercrete on the eastern side of America, if you kept the blocks dry, and coated the outside with some sort of protective coat, maybe paint, but I didn't go that far. I think people have used some ingredients that worked on the mold problem, you'll have to search for that.
Good Luck. Hope this helped, at least a little.
shadowweaver2010@...> wrote: I have noticed that most of the posts and such are from either the midwest or southwest. Are there any papercreters on the east coast that deal with the extended drying time and what solutions have you come up with to speed that up?
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