MUDBRICK MAKING

Some people make mudbricks by putting mud in a wheelbarrow or tub on the ground and mixing it.  This is daft – a house weighs about 20 tonnes, and if you mix the mud all by hand then each shovel you lift adds another 20 tonnes of work.

So I developed a way of making bricks using machinery – find a bit of ground with the right clay, dozer off the topsoil, then use a big rotary hoe to chop up the clay into powder. Spread straw on it and rotary hoe again.  Voila – instant brick mix.

Then put the dry clay in piles of about 10 yards (buckets), pour water into a puddle in the middle and mix until the right consistency (soft but just hard enough to hold the imprint of a boot).  Then put the mud into long piles with plastic under and over, wetted thoroughly.

Then you can make the bricks from the piles into double moulds.  I could make 300 bricks a day – you only need 2-3000 to make a house, so it’s quite quick.

I taught mudbrick housebuilding for a while.  I would get 30 or so students, make 20 tonnes of mud by Saturday midday, then they would make 2000 bricks by Sunday afternoon.  A couple of days later the bricks had set hard enough to turn on their edge, then a month later they were ready to build with.

Easy.

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