Week 3

There was plenty to do this week! With all of our materials here and plenty of sun, we were able to start the heavy lifting. We spent the beginning of the week mixing concrete with different cement to sand to water ratios and then tested all of these ratios in smaller molds, so not to waste too much material. While ideally we would like to use as little cement and water as possible to make it most realistic for the Senegalese, we kept finding that the concrete blocks with lower ratios were not holding up well enough. Ultimately, we decided that we will use the same cement to sand ratio as they would in Senegal (about one to three), but we will be using slightly more water since the sand we are using is a little different. Since we are not specifically looking to change the materials of the blocks right now, we decided it is okay to alter the block composition to fit our needs even though it is not entirely accurate. We are still getting an authentic Senegalese experience by mixing all the materials by hand and laying the blocks in the hot mountaintop sun!
Once we had a rough idea of what ratios worked best, we started mixing larger quantities to fill our actual block mold. It took some trial and error trying to determine the best ways to pack and flip our blocks, but we now have some pretty good samples! After all of our experimentation, we are now looking into how we can alter our mold to make the process run more smoothly. We’re on the right track! We will continue making blocks and hopefully be able to start constructing something next week.