Adobe in Action's Adobe Brickmaking Process

hello this is Kirk Rotella Dobey inactions director of education and this is our 2014 brick making process we start off by running some local soil through a 1/2 inch screen that's what I'm doing right here it's good to break the soil down a little bit smaller for adobe brick making and mortar here's a close-up of the soil again it's local soil from the Santa Fe River Basin and we're purchasing it from a local gravel yard and running it through the screen to get it ready this is an example of one of our mixing stations we're using these feed troughs and they're on a stand so everything's at waist height which makes it very comfortable and we're using these three gallon hard rubber buckets instead of shovels we use shovels to fill them up with our materials but we can get a more accurate mix if we use buckets because everyone's shovel is a different size and here's a shot of the mixing station again we're using garden hose to actually mix the mix inside this station and we have these rain barrels where we store water we're trying to conserve water and so this way we don't waste water this is these other rain barrels that we're using so we're getting ready to do a mix now this is Mike Lopez our executive director we start by adding water to the mixing station we're going to add four of these buckets and there are three gallons we have twelve gallons of water total we're just going to add and we like to add the water first because it makes it easier to mix then if we put the dry material in first and then the water it's harder to mix and we tend to have the dry mix sticking to the bottom of the station so here's our last bucket so we have 12 gallons of water in the station we're using straw we like to add straw to our adobe's this straw has gone through a leaf mulcher one one pass through the leaf mulcher and now we're going to use those same buckets using the same bucket for all of our measurements we're going to add two buckets notice how we're not really compacting we're just going to fill the bucket loosely with the straw to the top and then we'll add that to our mix so so far we have 12 gallons of water and that is three gallons now we have six gallons of chopped straw and it's always good then to get the straw a little bit wet in the mix so we're using the garden hoe here just to get the straw distributed in the mix otherwise it tends to clump up a little bit notice how comfortable it is to work at this height this is one of the reasons why we chose this system because we're working with a lot of volunteers and we want to keep things up off the ground now Mike's adding our screened soil so this is our clay rich soil of course we need clay and this soil has a pretty decent clay content and Mike's going to fill up a bucket we'll show you how we do this we fill it all the way to the top and then we just strike it with our hand like so and then that gets put into the mix and for our for this size mix we're doing seven buckets of the soil the clay rich soil I'm calling it now this is a one of the things we like to point out is it's good to have one person at least one person mixing while the mix is going in otherwise it tends to clump up at the bottom so here we have now Saul seven of our clay rich soil buckets in the mix and Mike and I are just a jeté ting the mix hydrating the clay making sure the clay the clay is our glue so we want to make sure that it's nicely distributed in the water and then the second ingredient is the sand we're using washed concrete's and it's very coarse or a little rocks all the way from the little rocks down to small grain sizes that's very important for making a strong earth and building materials and here also we're going to add seven buckets of the mix so it's a 50/50 mix 50% of our clay rich soil and 50% of our washed concrete's and a coarse sand of course your soil mix might be different so Mike's adding especially with the sand it's very important that you have at least one person mixing while you're adding this and because the sand tends to clump up at the bottom of the mix and here we are now we have all of our sand added so we have four buckets of water two buckets of straw seven buckets of clay rich soil local soil and now seven buckets of washed concrete sand coarse sand and it gets a little bit difficult to mix but it's it's it is considered a wet mix and I'm just showing you here with the action cam this movement of two people working at a station and getting the mix getting the sand evenly distributed getting everything evenly distributed that's what we want it's quite easy because we are doing a wet mix and we'll talk more about that later and then the last step is just to go in with your hands real quick check the edges make sure there are no clumps it's easy to miss clumps along the edges here's one that Mike found and which is going to break it up with his hand now that's sort of the last step in the mixing process and this mix is now ready to go out into the field into our forms here are our forms we've made fifty forms there are six bricks each so we have a total of 300 bricks that we can lay down at one time they're made with two by fours and they're screwed together brick size of course in New Mexico is ten by fourteen by three and a half so we lay these brick forms out on the ground like so two together and a lot of times people wet them we don't let them we're using such a wet mix that it's not really necessary this is our screed tool it's just a piece of fence on a welded onto a onto a handle and now we're transferring out the mud mix this is how we're doing it with our volunteers as well we're keeping it all very low-tech we're transferring the mud mix using those same three gallon buckets to the wheelbarrow and we want to go with about a half a wheelbarrow load if we go any more it's too heavy for our volunteers and we risk tipping them over and then the wheelbarrows go out into the field like so the forms are waiting and then we'll simply start on one end one for brick side of the form and we'll dump the mix out into the form normally we have a team of people doing this and then there's a little bit of hand work just to get sometimes we spill a little bit on the sides notice how wet the mix is there are two ways of making Adobe's one way is to do a very stiff mix and then pour the mix into the form and pull the form right away this is the wet method where it would not be possible to pull a form right away we have to let it sit for a few hours or in our case we let it sit overnight and now mike is going to take our screed and simply distribute the mud mix over these four sections of the brick form usually that's about what a wheelbarrow will fill about four sections and then without fussing too much we're just going to strike the top of the mud one or two times and just create more uniform bricks by getting the surface level we'll do that on both sides and again normally we have a team of people working here one or two people working on the form and it maybe goes a little bit quicker and that's pretty much it for this section we're just going to keep repeating this process bringing wheelbarrow laughter we're barrel in and dumping it on top of the forms usually with our volunteers we have you know two or three teams of people working on sets of form so we can lay out 36 bricks at one time and Mike's going ahead and distributing the mud again with the screed you could do this by hand as well or you could use little hand squeegees but we found out that this larger screed works really well and again once we get it distributed we do a simple pass over the top striking the top to give ourselves more uniform bricks so now we've got our form entirely full this is a little extra step that we like to do especially New Mexico in the summertime it's quite warm and sometimes that Sun or the wind will dry the bricks too quickly and they tend to crack a little bit so we want to keep our clay content relatively high that makes the bricks a little bit more water resistant and so for that reason we add just a little bit of water over the top on very warm days or very windy days and then Mike is actually going in with his hands here and just working the water into the surface a little bit we do not really want to smooth out the surfaces we want rough surfaces that actually makes it easier when we start building adobe walls with these bricks rough surfaces grab the mortar better and Mike is just finishing up here doing some final cleanup work and making sure that things are nice nicely distributed so we have our 12 bricks laid down here and we just repeat this process throughout the day and like I said before we can lay out about 300 bricks now this is these are some bricks that we made the day before so we're just showing you how we pull the forms off the next day you can see that the bricks are still wet on the sides there for the tops are dry so it's quite easy with two people this size form you want to have two people simply grab it on the ends and it pops right off and again these bricks were not these forms were not pre wet and because the mix is so wet is relatively easy to pull the forms off the next step is to carefully stand the bricks up on end so usually we can do this the next day depending on the weather within one day or two days maximum we can stand the bricks up and we want to get them up like this as soon as possible because this will help them to dry out and Mike's using this little hand hoe just to scrape if we do this scraping stage right now you could use a trowel you could use a piece of metal Mike's using this little garden hoe just quickly scrape the bottom and we'll have more uniform bricks and then once we have them dry in the field for about a week we we like to put them on pallets like so we can put thirty ten three rows of ten that's thirty bricks and then we can go the opposite way so we're getting 60 bricks on the pallet and normally we put five more flat on the top notice how we leave a little bit of space between them and then we go ahead and wrap these with shrink wrap and they're ready to be picked up by a little forklift and put on a flatbed truck and delivered to one of our recipients which are normally nonprofit organizations thank you and take care

Channel: Adobe in Action

Views: 943,510

Rating: 4.6972518 out of 5

Keywords: adobe, adobe bricks, adobe construction, earthbuilding, earthen bricks, greenbuilding, earthen blocks

Id: uWBz9kl-hTA

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 01 2014