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We started with raw land, built an earthbag structure 2 years ago. We built the cordwood addition a year after that. Earthbag building and cordwood building is difficult work. All along, I’ve been thinking that compressed earth bricks are the best. They’re strong, they’re fast to build with, and they are 100% natural. What more could I ask for?
So I built a CEB press. It took some metal from the custom fab shop, a bunch of drilled holes, and a tad of welding. I plugged this into the tractor, fired it up, and pressed the first brick. (link to CEB fabrication pictures)
earth compressed bricks
So we moved on to test the CEB press in the field. We build ourselves an open source tractor first , because we weren’t satisfied with industrial tractors that just kept braking. So with our new tractor, which we call the life-giving, life-time design LifeTrac , we began to build.
We started to build an addition right behind the stick-frame greenhouse , so the greenhouse would not be blown over by winds that huff and puff quite strongly around here.
We started to clear off the area, but the front end loader was not much good on hard, clayey soil. We tried some disking, but the disking did not go too deep.
We then sampled the soil, which we tilled with out rototiller , to test if it would work for bricks. It has to have sufficient clay to stick together, but not too much to make it crack. The soil was go.
The tiller was not our best friend either, so we needed something that would really sink its teeth into the ground. So we built the world’s first open source tooth bar. Design rationale included.
This worked well. We were able to mound up pile after pile of good soil , our gold , for CEB brick pressing. We covered the pile diligently with plastic sheeting when the weather was foul.
In the meantime, we built some trusses for the addition. 2×4s were put together into 32 foot long trusses, 2 feet high, with oriented strand board – OSB – connecting plates. A truss like this cost us $50 a pop in materials.
We also got the gravel truck in, for the addition foundation.
We then did a test run , to see how many bricks we could press in a sample run. Last minute adjustments, and we were good to go. We moved the machine into position. We tilled, we mixed in a little sand, we raked it fine. And then We pressed 4 per minute, 52 in 13 minutes , with manual loading with 5 gallon buckets. Hmm. If we could do that the whole day, we would press about 2000 bricks.
In all reality, it takes 15 people to load the machine as fast as the machine could produce bricks. The backbreaking work is shoveling dirt into buckets and lifting them to feed the machine.
We continued for 14 days of this, mostly with 2 or 3 people. Hard labor required separates Big People from sucklings. We learned that such hard labor puts parties involved at severe risk of destroying friendships or even families.
In all honesty , the version of the machine with a manually-loaded hopper is not so useful, because it’s impossible to gather 15 people, so you’re running the machine way under its capacity. With 2 people, we made 500 bricks per day on average. One can load enough soil for 250 bricks on a sustainable basis. That is the bottleneck.
via Factor e Live Distillations – Part 5 – The CEB Story | Open Source Ecology.