Thursday, June 18, 2015

Week 4

With two new block molds ready to go, we started the week with high hopes. Because we’re constructing a fairly small building, we’ve decided to build two new molds at 75% the size of the original. We figured this would allow us to produce more blocks in less time, and at a more manageable size. After making some initial alterations to the new molds on Monday, we started laying our new blocks on Tuesday. Unfortunately we’ve since had a few setbacks since. While we’ve gotten pretty good at mixing the concrete, filling the molds, and flipping them, we’ve been having a lot of trouble with the release. The corners and insides of the blocks are not coming out cleanly.
After altering our mix ratios and varying how much we packed the molds and having little success, we decided to look into ways to facilitate the release of the concrete mix from the wood mold. The bad news is we still haven’t found the perfect solution. The good news is it has forced us to be pretty creative. So far we’ve tried spraying the mold with cooking spray, lining it with recycled plastic bags, brushing it with vegetable oil, and lining it with heavy duty aluminum foil. We may try vaseline, but based on the results using other oils, we are not too hopeful for this approach either. We would like to have a metal mold like they use in Senegal, but unfortunately these are not for sale and would take too much valuable time to make for just the control building. We are having a planning meeting tonight with our advisers to develop our next strategy.
On a more positive note, all of our group members are now woodshop and 3D printer certified as of this week. We have also had some downtime to start drawing and making small scale models for future projects to begin once the control building is built, like a miniature sandbag mock-up out of sand, balloons, and glue. Although we don’t have a ton to show from our work this week, we’ve definitely learned a lot and remain optimistic.

Check out Lehigh’s website for an article by Kelly Hochbein about our project! http://www1.lehigh.edu/news/better-buildings-senegal

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