Dale Hodgins wrote:This is purely speculative at this point. I've seen a few videos on the small scale manufacture of CEBs. There are hand operated units and hydraulic ones.
Some hydraulic splitters have a plunger which pushes strait down. It would seem that these machines are one chunk of plate steel from being able to be used to compact CEBs.
One or several forms could be made which would sit on the table in place of firewood. A simple pin jig would ensure proper placement of the form so that its edges are not hit by the decending plate. Prepared dirt could be slid from a pan which sits to one side of the plunger. A block could be poured and pressed. If its too thin , add some mix and press again. The lever action machines are dead slow. Something like this is a low cost alternative.
I imagine there’s a way to compress 8 bricks at a time with a simple attachment tool. I’m not completely sure, but I would think that compressing four bricks stacked on top of four more bricks simultaneously would make up for the time it takes to compress and retract with a wood splitter. You would need two separate molds that someone can fill while another is compressing, but you’ll still need a third person to handle the soil mixing process. I’m not sure, but I don’t imagine building four molds of four bricks is really that expensive.
Maybe building molds for larger bricks would make more sense for use in a log splitter
