[Stoves] Fwd: Briquette Mini press.mp4

[Richard Stanley]

Andrew,
Thanks.
There are many presses using bottlenecks screws hi lifts as well
Even caulking guns. Lots of options but the as yet a far wider arena of skills resources blends, justifies this for all the designs thus far. It's foolish naïveté to propose to have the be all end all design. Costs will be up to the labor and materials for small runs by the local producer in the less industrialised nations. As supplied from the more  industrialized nation, cost will be highly dependent upon volume and tooling. This mitigates for emergency disaster releif supply from the industrialized nation. It also mitigates for  the local supply of the item by local artisans in the more typical smaller runs to serve their own region of a daily basis.
It was filmed by our own media coordinator in Los Angeles but it's not necessarily for the plug and play culture. You won't penetrate that until you see something more automated and much cleaner in operation. We've been working on that one for awhile.

As to diameter and hole size. This appears most popular. We began with ben bryants recommended 15cm od 50mm id and toyed with smaller 7cm od shapes but for optimal compression balanced against required leverage and press costs- and daily production capacity for the entrepreneur, this fits in most cases we've seen. 

It's fairly easy to mechanically change the cylinder and piston but it has to be optimized to the above parameters to be useful to the entrepreneur.

As to thickness of the briquette, Nottingham university's Joel Chaney points out that for any given id, it better to keep the area to volume ratio at near unity for optimized performance (that roughly translates to a thickness, read height, about equal to the radius. 

Generally a finished bq (10cm dia X 70 mm height w/ a 34 mm dia center hole comes out of the cylinder at 4 to 500 grams. It will dry down to 125 to 150 grams in balance with ambient humidity. There is a wide variation though, depending upon the blends used. A charcoal crumb dust- rich blend out at 500 grams will still weigh 150 to 250 grams at ambient humidity. Grass and straw blends drop off to the lower weights mentioned.

Hope that helps. Look for the full details on our website on about a month.

Kind regards,
Richard Stanley

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 20, 2011, at 6:08 AM, ajheggie at gmail.com wrote:

> On Sunday 20 February 2011 00:21:29 Richard Stanley wrote:
>> Now that I have almost thoroughly unsold it, enjoy,
> 
> 
> Nice video Richard, always interesting to put a face to a name.
> 
> Was it being filmed by a reporter? It almost seemed by the way you 
> answered the cameraman thought the briquettes were for US use.
> 
> What sort of budget costs for this? If you look at the Jack-all or Hi-lift 
> type of mechanical 3 tonne jacks you will see similarities. It would be a 
> matter of adapting the shoe and  foot to accept your piston and cylinder.
> 
> Do you promote a standard diameter, hole diameter and finished thickness?
> 
> If it weren't for the drying problem in UK I'd be tempted to play with 
> paper pulp bound sawdust and grass cuttings again.
> 
> What is the wet weight of one of these briquettes fresh off the press 
> compared with the ready to burn weight and oven dry weight?
> 
> AJH
> 
> 
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