Clay and straw bricks - manufacturing technology

Clay and straw bricks - manufacturing method

Adobe bricks, or clay bricks and straw is an environmentally friendly building material and is often used to build houses in dry and hot climates.

The base for adobe bricks is a mixture of sand, clay and straw with water, which is thoroughly mixed until homogeneous. They make bricks from adobe and dry them naturally, first in the sun, and then under a ventilated canopy. The building of this brick does not differ in high thermal conductivity and resistance to water, but nevertheless, they are widely used in regions in the south with low rainfall due to the comfortable temperature inside the building in the summer heat.

It is not difficult to make adobe bricks on your own, even without using any mechanisms.

How to make such bricks, from straw and clay, is described in the article.

Material for making adobe bricks

As mentioned above, adobe bricks consist of four components:

• Water.
• Straw.
• Sand.
• Clay.

The ratio of the components can be found out by experiments, and they are dependent on for the most part, on the quality of the clay you can find near the construction site. It is building clay that is practically never available in natural conditions in its pure form and can have a certain percentage of impurities, usually sand. Depending on how greasy the clay is, sieved hand sand can be added to it in the required amount.

You can dig up clay where builders and stove-makers take it. If the soil is clayey on the site, you can use the soil that is removed from the pit under the foundation.

Prepared clay for adobe bricks should not contain foreign debris, impurities and stones. If you prepare a huge amount of clay in advance, then you can lay it in the ground, cover it with polyethylene and leave it to rest - this will only make its quality better.

The sand should be coarse, and the optimum size of the grains should be from 0. 1 cm. Dusty sands are not suitable for brick making.

The sand needs to be dried and sieved, as well as to remove debris, stones, roots from plants and other inclusions from it. Any straw is useful - rye, wheat, barley, and besides, it must be in a dry state, without any traces of rot.

Ideally use fresh straw. Water is the last ingredient in the adobe mix, but not least. Brick strength will depend on its purity, because water containing acidic salts can lead to its rapid destruction.

Ideally, it is worth taking fresh water from a well or well, without contamination and chemical impurities.

How to determine component proportions? To do this, you should take one part of sand and clay, mix them thoroughly when adding water and knead a solution that is similar in consistency to a hard dough. It is important to roll a ball the size of a tennis ball out of the solution and put it in the sun for 1 hour. After that, you need to drop it onto a flat surface from a height of 1.5 meters.

With the optimal proportion of sand and clay, the ball should retain its shape. If the ball is flattened without the appearance of cracks, then you need to make more sand, and in the case when it crumbles, then reduce it.

Details

Form for bricks

Forming of adobe bricks should be carried out in wooden, plastic or metal forms, which represent a box without a bottom with one or more cells of the required shape. The easiest way to do it yourself is to make wood-type forms from planed boards with a thickness of 2.4 to 3.

6 cm. After determining the required brick size, you need to make a drawing of the form, according to which the boards are cut. They need to be fastened with self-tapping screws in 3-4 places at each joint. The number of bricks in the form can be any and depend on the size of the bricks, and the form should not be very heavy. At the edges it is required to equip it with handles for ease of movement.

The walls of the mold should be easily cleaned of adobe, which sticks - this is a mortar for molding bricks. To do this, they are made smooth, and the corners are carefully adjusted. When using molds without a bottom, the surface of the forming platform must be dry, even, and its surface must be covered with a layer of straw so that there is no brick adhesion when drying. If the weather is changeable and there is a chance of rain, then the site needs to be covered with an awning.

DIY method of making bricks from straw and clay

So, the technology is as follows:

1. Dig a pit to mix the adobe.

   In this case, the depth of the pit must be made 0.3-0. 5 meters, and its walls should be almost vertical, and the bottom should be perfectly flat. No pits and unnecessary items, debris, stones. The pit must be covered with a waterproof material, for example, an awning or tarpaulin, and the edges of the material must necessarily extend beyond the edges of the pit by 0.

   3-0. 5 meters.

2. Water needs to be poured into the pit - this is about 1/3 of its depth, and after that, sand and clay are gradually poured in the selected proportion. Traditionally, kneading is done with your feet, kneading and mixing the components, and the canvas edges can be easily lifted to better move the layers. When stirring, a liquid solution of a clay-sand type should be obtained, homogeneous and without lumps.

   It is better to knead adobe together, and hold hands - this way there will be less chance of slipping and falling.

3. Gradually add straw to the prepared solution, mixing it with clay. If the slab was added before, then it will float on the water surface, and also does not mix well.Straw needs to be added to an adobe consistency, which resembles a plastic and thick dough. There should be no pools of water in the pit; the solution should not be allowed to dry out either.

4. Mixed with a pitchfork or shovel, adobe is loaded into a wheelbarrow or even into a stretcher and delivered to the forming platform. It is necessary to moisten the form, set it in place of drying the brick and fill it with ready-made adobe to the top, removing excess even objects, for example, boards.
5. Tap the sides of the form a little and carefully remove it, holding the handles on both sides. If the shape is huge, you need to do it together. You can manually gently squeeze the brick from above if it starts to stick to the walls and does not come out.

6. Before a new batch, the mold must be cleaned of adobe, moistened with water and placed near the finished bricks so that there is room for air to blow over them.
7. Further games need to be done in the same way. In 1 day, a team of 4-5 people can make about 100-200 bricks, and at the same time, the volume of the mortar must be such that it can form bricks without allowing it to dry out. A diluted solution will lose some of its strength.
8. Brick rows dry naturally within 2-8 days, and the drying time will depend on humidity and temperature.

   After that, they need to be stacked under a canopy, where they are stored until construction begins.

Now let's talk directly about construction.

Construction of adobe bricks

Adobe bricks made of straw and clay are an environmentally friendly material, and it makes it easy to breathe in houses, does not overcome heat and high humidity ...

Such material is cheap and available to everyone who is not afraid to get their feet and hands dirty.

The disadvantages of this material are its low ability to retain heat and low resistance to water, and its decorative qualities are no better. in a humid climate, a building made of such a brick quickly absorbs moisture, begins to crumble and deform.

To avoid this, external house walls need to be finished with simple clay fired bricks, and the internal ones should be protected with steam insulation. In this case, it will last much longer from a brick made with your own hands.

They lay a brick of clay with the addition of straw on the mortar, which was chosen to create the brick itself, but true without the addition of straw. The first row is required to be separated from the base by means of waterproofing. Wall joints and corners must be reinforced with mesh reinforcement. The adobe brick cannot withstand point loads, and therefore beams, and also floors, must be laid with a redistribution of the load on the wall surface. Subject to these rules, the house will serve faithfully for more than a dozen years.

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