Re: [papercreters] Re: Best way to pour 6" x 12" x 52" block?

I live in SW Arizona and it is hot and dry. However, 8 months of the year we have conditions similar to Montana in the summer. (I used to live in NW Montana) I place my block forms on plastic to allow the water to drain off and then tamp the mix and the resulatant blocks are very sturdy with very little shrinkage. I move them off the plastic as soon as I can, which in the summer is within a couple of hours and in the rest of the year, perhaps the next day. The slip form advocates seem to dismiss or fail to address the problem of lifting the mix after the walls get a few feet high. True, the block making/tamping process is work, but so would be lifting heavy wet mud eight feet high. I don't have any forklifts or front end loaders so I would have to lift it by hand. Ugh!  --- On Sun, 7/1/12, Ron Richter <ronerichter@yahoo.com> wrote: From: Ron Richter <ronerichter@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: [papercreters] Re: Best way to pour 6" x 12" x 52" block? To: "papercreters@yahoogroups.com" <papercreters@yahoogroups.com> Date: Sunday, July 1, 2012, 10:46 AM   Dan, A friend of mine who's a whiz with humidity suggested I construct mini-greenhouses over my molds.  This would raise the temperatures and dewpoints, drawing the moisture out of the paper and onto the overlaying plastic sheeting.  The water would then condense on the plastic and roll down the sides and away from the molds. I tried this too.  I built a neat little greenhouse out of visqueen and 1/2" pvc piping and loaded it with 1 week old bricks (I had to wait a week just so I could move them without breaking them).  It took even longer to get them to dry.  The humidity was so high in the green house that they never dried until I finally took the greenhouse off them.  Gravity pulls the moisture out of the slurry along with dry (warm) air and movement of that dry air does the rest. If you have limited dry air you are going to be in for a wait.  The problem with the water is one we all struggle with, mainly because it slows a project down so much.  I teach in Alaska during the August to June time period so it left me little time to wait around to have bricks drying in Montana where I am experimenting. So I switched to the slip form method as soon as I figured out it eliminated the extra pressing, rolling, and waiting involved with bricks.  In my photo section you will also see I started making a press to form bricks that were more uniform.  I found an post hole auger and was going to drive slurry through a "squeeze box" that ended being the size I wanted.  Then I would have a continuous extrusion of PC which could be cut into bricks.  While I was building this test apparatus, I started toying with the slip forms and the rest is history.  You can get videos of Mike McCain making acres of bricks and using them in less than a week down in Arizona or New Mexico, but even with high daytime temps and dry air here in Montana it take weeks to have a usable brick.  With the slip forms, I took all the wait time out of the equation and I didn't care if the PC took weeks to dry because it was stable in the wall. Here is a link to the photos section of my project: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/papercreters/photos/album/591081946/pic/list You can see lots of others postings by clicking on the photo link on the left hand column of any of these messages that get posted. Ron

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