Laying Up The Foundation Bricks

So here we are again making bricks. As I said at the end of my last post I had saved all of the clay soil that I had dug out of the foundation trenches. I piled all of it up by the mixer to use it for making bricks. I figured why go haul the clay soil from the other side of the property when I had so much from digging the foundation trenches.

Ok we (my son Charles and I) got ready to start this morning and I found that my shredder / mulcher wasn't working. So I had to work on the shredder. I ended up having to replace the switch in order to get it working. Once I got the shredder working I was ready to start making bricks. Yeah, that didn't happen. I found that one of the mixer paddles in my cement mixer had broken. So I had to pull out the welder to fix the broken mixer paddle. Once that was done then we could finally get to making the foundation bricks.

So I did a little math to decide how much slacked lime to use. In order to get the 5% - 7% of lime in the mix to be able to get lime stabilized adobe bricks I needed about 1 gallon of the slacked lime. I used a coffee can that was just under a gallon. So I had to use 1 full can of lime and a second can about 1/4 of the way filled. I also found that if I added some water first then added the lime before anything else, then the lime would get fully mixed into the water. Then I added the sand to the mix. This allows for the lime to be thoroughly and evenly mixed throughout all of the adobe mix. Once the line and 2 buckets of sand were mixed I would then add 1 bucket of the clay soil and 1 bucket of the shredded straw. I kept mixing until everything was mixed well adding water only as needed to keep the consistency of the mix. I wanted the mix to be fairly stiff and sticky like frosting but, with just a little slump so that it would release from the mold.

Even after all of the issues that we had to deal with in the morning we were able to get 141 bricks laid up in the afternoon. We called it quits about 5:30 PM MST. I mixed 7 loads in the mixer and Charles pressed the bricks into the form to lay them down. You can see Charles standing with all of the bricks in the picture.

The one downside to the day was that on the last batch I mixed up the mixer paddle broke again. So tomorrow morning I'll have to pull the pieces out and weld them up then reinstall the mixing paddle before I can start mixing more batches tomorrow. My thanks to the gods for the inspiration that lead to the creation of the electric wire feed arc welder. Don't leave home without it! After the repair it'll be back to making bricks.