[Stoves] sausage maker adaptor for manual briquette presses

Richard Stanley rstanley at legacyfound.org
Tue Nov 22 07:59:22 CST 2011


Xavier… Where do we start…
You began by show links to mechanised briquettes thru Peracod, which is running some kind of mechanised extruder creating relatively high pressure and temperature and probably using  a binder. Fine That is the classic method. But  then you went on to show a hand operated levered 4 cylinder design using wet pulped material--probably paper and some charcoal fines or sawdust That involves a very different kind of process. The two cannot be compared really. The former is for and industry and distribtuion to a wide market area around it. The latter is more for a cottage industry in the pri urba areas to rural areas. althouth it can survive quite well in  urban neighborhoods / other concentrated areas as well.

You go on to say you have already made such a press with 25 cylinders. In terms of numbers of briquettes per unit time you certaily may well have the fastest press but that is not the kind of claim that makes sense without more qualifiers: What about the total mass being processed and more importantly as it is almost all labor cost as you recognised, I wonder  about the mass per unit labor input per time being processed.  

Eg Our older Mini Bryant hand press produces abot 150 kgs of material day but requires 4 people to operate ---and simultaneously collect process and supply the feedstock.  Our forthcoming ratchet press 
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CivcY4XCCY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

is designed around the notion of portability and ease of use. It will process the same amount of material as the larger press BUT with only one operator and one or two other persons supplying material. Either can be operated with use of dividing washers to produce great numbers of briquettes , or they can be making fewer larger briquettes….

The general rule of thumb for the wet hand process, is that the briquette fuel, in whatever shape is appropriate, will cost the average 6 person family between 15 and 20% of one production workers daily wage. say 3.00 a day salarythen 45 to 60 US cents per family. That presumes direct distribution from producito site to the market, no middlemen and no transport ( These are after all miccroenterprises really small roadside operations lots of them . Scale it up and of course one has to re-calculate …You can see the margins here and I am guessing that they will be pretty close to what you are already projecting, or ?  ….

Still though, with free resources and the press tech we are talking about, the product production cost is + 90%  dependent upon labor cost.

Just checked our site and it is running fine from here. Hmmm.

The insert is just a Google Sketchup (free 3 d drawing program) exerise as yet. I have an artisan in Tanzania who wants to try it. I will  return to the US in December to develop it with him--online…At its simplest form,  its just a wood  plug with 4 to 6 holes bored thru. The plug is then stuffed into the conventional perforated PVC cylinder and screwed in place. The conventional solid wood piston then does not pass all the way thru the  ylinder but rather just rams material thru the holes . 

There are two design implications:
1) As the process expells lots of water, this has to be ducted away from the emerging sausage biquettes, Some sort of simple  skirt would be necessary:
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2) as the plug is fixed into the PVC cylinder –It is not normally removed except for repair.– you have to have some way to hold the cylnder and plug assembly up off the base in order to let the sausages emerge. Here a stand with a lip on which to rest the cylinder and a cavity beneath to allow the handling of the extruded sausages need to be made up. 

Other than that it should be relatively simple affair to knock together.

Hope this adds something but I also want to have aclear understandng of whee you are going. Will your group be able to train others and woudl it want to ? I ask because we get inquiries all the time and will be happy to pass them onto you. 

Kind regards,

Richard Stanley
DAr es Salaam Tz. 

On Nov 22, 2011, at 7:54 AM, Xavier Brandao wrote:

> 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
> 



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