Anyone use a $275 Home Depot style cement mixer?

I'm physically worn out from mixing mortars, concrete & earthen plasters by hand.

Will a $275 Home Depot style mixer hold up to the task of a single earth plastered home followed by general small projects around the homestead for a few years or longer?

I wonder if you could get something from craigslist?

Thanks, Paul. I searched the local Craigslist and found an unused mixer for a $150... but it would be a 5 hour drive round trip to get it. 

Maybe you need to post to craigslist that you are looking.

I bought one from harbor frieght cost 109.00 still works great . have had it for 2 years now !

rusty wrote:Will a $275 Home Depot style mixer hold up to the task of a single earth plastered home followed by general small projects around the homestead for a few years or longer?

We have three small cement mixers which do 5 gallon pails of concrete. We used these to build our tiny cottage. They're great. We have three because one 10 year old boy can keep two going to keep the older folks applying ferro-cement. We ran them up to 12 hours a day during our big push days. The third one is backup incase of failure. No problem though. See:

http://sugarmtnfarm.com/blog/2007/10/mixer.html

The reason we used this small mixer is it kept the ferro-cement very fresh. We were working in the cold with non-chloride based accelerants. Note the snow in the background of many of the photos. You can pour concrete in the middle of a Vermont winter. Don't if you can get away with it. This year we managed to stop pouring by early November. Seems we're always pushing the season.

For mixing larger volumes a barrel tumbler mixer is advised. For bigger than that we hire in ready-mix concrete by the truck load such as the building of our on-farm slaughterhouse (current project).

Cheers,

-Walter

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

Walter, that little Husky looks interesting. I'm guessing they'd burn up pretty quickly doing "infill" earthen plaster. How do you think they'd do on a wetter "finish" earthen plaster?

rusty wrote:Walter, that little Husky looks interesting. I'm guessing they'd burn up pretty quickly doing "infill" earthen plaster. How do you think they'd do on a wetter "finish" earthen plaster?

Our cottage weighs about 100,000 lbs. That's about 25 cubic-yards of concrete. Some of that weight was the concrete block but we filled those blocks (thus infill) with rebar and concrete. Nice stiff mix. The primary one we used mixed about 16 cu-yds. That's a lot of five gallon pails. None of our mixers burned out. They performed great and I would pickup another if I saw it available - they seem to not be though. I was fortunate to get these on-sale.

We also did mix plaster and adobe with them, both of which were lighter mixes, and they did those fine as well. The Husky mixer has a strong motor and is very geared down which may explain why it performs so well. Do NOT get your fingers stuck in it. They bent a steel rod on us in a very quick OOps!

What I really want though is my own pump and sprayer. I have a little adobe/concrete sprayer but it is slow.

Walter,

Thanks for the additional info. I'll keep my eyes peeled for one of those....or maybe two as you did. Perhaps I'll get lucky and actually find them.

r