[Greenbuilding] Crushing Clay

natural building naturalbuilding at shaw.ca
Wed Aug 3 15:55:44 CDT 2011


Rob, I tried the "dissolve-all-of-the-clay-to-make-a-minimally-wet-clay-slip" approach at a fairly early stage in the process but it was totally unworkable. The ratio of water to clay necessary to achieve the optimum Proctor (compressive strength) is in the region of 30 - 35% by weight (water to clay) and resulted in a ridiculously sticky mixture that was impossible to then combine evenly with the aggregate. It just turns into a large ball covered in gravel. Cute but useless!

I'll have to look into the hammer mill concept and maybe devise a home-made, compact, version...
or maybe the ball mill idea that Ward mentioned...

Thanks for the suggestions...

Steve Satow

www.naturalbuildingsite.net
naturalbuilding at shaw.ca

On 2011-08-03, at 11:59 AM, RT wrote:

> But then I also wondered if it is really necessary to go to the bother of crushing the clay ?
> 
> Since the clay is presumably being used as a binder for the coarse aggregrate, would it be feasible to simply dissolve all of the clay to make a minimally-wet clay slip and then add the coarse aggregate to the slip to be coated by the clay ?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20110803/aa2b3c28/attachment.html>


More information about the Greenbuilding mailing list