[Stoves] sausage maker adaptor for manual briquette presses

[Xavier Brandao]

Dear Richard,

We might start to produce some charcoal dust briquettes, to complete our
institutional stove activity. Another company we work with has a motorized
extruder for clay. I think the director bought it in Ghana, only the adaptor
is missing, so he might be interested by your adaptor! He is also interested
in producing briquettes.

As for our NGO, we are now looking for an easy-to-make and cheap press. We
are seeking minimal investment, and production on a small scale at first.
>From our institutional stoves, we already have a workshop with a lot of
space, drying areas which are used for the stoves clay, but have more than
enough space to welcome briquettes. I studied the market and made a few
calculations, charcoal dust is cheap, clay is cheap, paper is free.
Workforce will be the major cost. We might be able to produce briquettes
costing only a bit more than half the charcoal price. 

I found great info on how to setup a project from PERACOD:
http://www.peracod.sn/spip.php?rubrique4 

Shaping the briquettes by hands is time consuming and then too costly, so
only the press lacks. I wasn't able to find a sausage maker or a pellet
press on the main markets and construction stores or stores where machine
tools are sold. Vendors say there's no demand, therefore no offer for these
machines. Usually, welders make the machine tools on demand. They need to
see first the machine they will copy, and they charge a high price.
We have a team of two welders and material, so we could make a simple press
such as this one (my favorite) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs0D_aVtgq8 

I found this video inspiring, so we made a kind of small hand press, costing
absolutely nothing, able to press 6 small cube briquettes at once. The mold
is made of 30X30 mm square iron tubes. You take the mold in the left hand,
and the pressing device in right hand, the latter being made of round iron
and 2mm thick iron sheets. I will try it today and see how fast it makes
briquettes. Charcoal briquettes with clay do not need such a high pressure.
Funny enough, I saw just now that the inventor of the first press also made
a iron tubes version, with the same principle. It doesn't press 6 but 25
briquettes in a single push! He says it is the fastest of all hand presses!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_LW38THm2s 

You recently said there were more than 25 briquette presses of all kind.
I saw the presses designed by the Legacy Foundation:
http://bioenergylists.org/en/legacypresses 
Are they suited to 80% charcoal dust, 10% clay, 10% paper? Do you know how
much briquettes or kilos per type of material can be produced per hour for
the different presses? I think the economic viability will depend on this
factor. Would you recommend one press in particular?
By the way, I wasn't able to access the Legacy Foundation website. Do you
know if it works at the moment?

Cheers,

Xavier


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2011 22:45:48 +0100
From: Richard Stanley <rstanley at legacyfound.org>
To: Stoves and biofuels network <Stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: [Stoves] sausage maker adaptor for manual briquette presses
Message-ID: <4E3747F2-8137-4D33-8FFF-5522C5FD1917 at legacyfound.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

For all you pellet, sausage-size-biomass fuel-needing  stovers, we are
playing with an adaptor for the conventional batch-fed cylinder press to
allow one to make multiple quantities of anything from sausage sizes down to
pellets.

The idea is being co-vented  as we speak and its very much 'open-source',
so please , feel free to dive in with design thoughts, all. 
Although in this sketch, I suggest using metal pipes welded together, there
is in retrospect, little reason it could not be made out of just a
cylindrical block of wood.  

In this design you would not be pushing the piston completely through the
cylinder (as you do with many of the conventional briquette.presses)  The
material would just be coming out  the tubes and breaking off (or, it could
be cut off) at a certain length.    
Please be first on the  block to try it out.  If it can work for you,  it
will help many  with their many different types of briquette presses,  in
the network. 

Basi Haya, na aluta Continua,

Richard
www.legacyfound.org 
Arusha Tanzania