[Greenbuilding] Crushing Clay

[RT]

--- In SB-r-us at yahoogroups.com, the Nogales Nightmare (Bill Steen  
<bill at ...> wrote:
>
> First of all I plead sanity to Rob Tom's suggestion that I've used a  
> hammer mill to crush clay.
> I think moving to a more ideal place to live that supported other  
> methods would be easier and preferable.
> As for how to deal with such a creature, I've found that the easiest  
> way, at least for us, was to soak the clay in water and let it break  
> down.
> Some do this easier than others and yes, there are some that really  
> resist dissolving.
>But let's start with those that do.  Couple of things we've done include  
> building a a rectangular pit from straw bales on pallets, lining it with  
> a canvas or porous tarp and putting the clay and water into this  
> container.  Once soft, the clay can be mixed more thoroughly with the  
> water, ideally completely and then what will happen is that the heavier  
> aggregates will fall to the bottom and the clay layer will be on top and  
> easy to separate.  It's a little time consuming, but not out of the  
> question if the clay will dissolve.
>If the hardened pieces of clay resist the method above one typically has  
> to resort to some sort of mechanical crushing whether manually or by  
> some sort of device.  The best thing I've seen that made sense to me and  
> is the route I would go if I had enough use for, is a crusher that I saw  
> in Denmark a couple of years ago.  It was made by a guy from Holland who  
> produces vertical shaft mixers, various types of machines for compressed  
> soil blocks and a machine that resembles a vertical shaft mixer and does  
> a beautiful job of reducing hardened clay chunks to a powder.  It was  
> relatively small, portable and I think the cost of buying and getting  
> one here could be justified depending upon the quality of work one did  
> with clay.
>We've also encountered different situations such as when we were in Nova  
> Scotia, we were delivered clay that was free of aggregates of any sort  
> and that came in dense blocks, still moist, not unlike what would  
> purchase from a ceramic supplier for making pottery.  There what worked  
> best and gets into the the techniques Rob Tom described, was to peel off  
> slivers with a shovel, throw them into a mortar mixer and add a small  
> amount of sand with water to get the clay dissolved.
>In short, there's a lot of variation when it comes to clay, the forms it  
> comes in and how to get it mixed to the right consistency for the work  
> being done.  My solution for places as in the above, short of moving  
> west and south, find a brick factory and purchase their crushed and dry  
> clay if possible.  Just did that in Denver and will do it next year in  
> Minnesota.
>Bill

Eh-h-h-h... t'werent a "suggestion" re: hammer mill use, more like an  
accusation.

But speaking of vertical shaft gizmos for breaking clay chunks, in lieu of  
importing the Dutch crusher from Yurp ('scuse me) to British Columbia, I  
wonder if a person could modify a portable hydraulic wood splitter  
(something that I would imagine that almost every non-urbanite in BC would  
have easy access to) to crush clay ?

It's not usual to find these rigs having hydraulic cylinders with 16-22  
tonne capacity (flip from horizontal to vertical stroke operation easily)  
and the little putt-putt engines on them will run for a good half day on  
not more than a tofu container's worth of fuel. And I don't think that  
it'd be a stretch to find some BC Greenies who have modified their rigs to  
run on bio-diesel.

Just reflecting a bit on my earlier comment about one needing to crush  
possibly 10 tonnes (a wild-@$$ guesstimate) of clay for building  
walls(rammed earth or cob, not strawbale), now I think that guesstimate  
was grossly inadequate. ie Two foot thick walls, say 10 ft high, say 150  
lineal ft for a modest-sized building = minimum of 3000 cu ft of earth and  
coarse aggregate or about 6 tri-axle dumptrucks full (@18-22 tonnes per  
truckload) and assuming that at least one fifth of that is clay, well,  
clearly my earlier WAG was wrong.

That's a honking-big heap of clay that needs to be processed. So maybe  
Beel and El Lupo aren't so insane after all in resorting to a using a  
hammermill. Eh what ? (And that was painful for me to concede).

-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c  at  Y a h o o  dot  C A >
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