From Scotland to Samrong- FASE Diary Week 2
Focusing on our first task, the earth blocks, here is a quick run through of what we achieved so far.
With the office closed on Monday and Tuesday for the public holidays celebrating King Norodom Sihamoni’s Birthday, we picked up where we left off last week on Wednesday.
The big focus for us this week was to finalise everything we were going to need to complete field-testing on the earth blocks samples, as well as beginning to source equipment to create the full size earth block bricks.
Due to the lengthy waiting times for lab testing in Phnom Penh we have designed a rig (drawing) that will allow us to quickly perform fairly accurate impression/compression tests on the existing cement samples prepared by Ed Dale-Harris on a previous trip. (lab testing to act as a final confirmation at a later date. This will allow us to shortlist 3-4 final cement mixtures that we can make up into small batches (~100 total) of full sized bricks.
To make the full sized bricks we also designed some moulds that can be used both for testing and during larger scale production later in the year.
With rough sketches for each in hand we headed to various machine shops and welders around Samroang. One of the local staff at CIDO, Sarin, helped significantly with translating the sketches and explaining the purpose of the moulds. Eventually we were able find a shop that could produce both of our designs in just a few days.
We visited the workshop the next morning for a check up, and they had already constructed the earth block moulds! Our initial impressions are that they will be durable enough to produce blocks for the entire building project, and that they are lightweight enough to be easily handled onsite.
All of our testing and trial block making will be conducted on the same site as the future Agritech centre. We have started preparing a test site and shelter that will house our testing rig, small scale earth block production, and should provide a useful shelter throughout the build of the Centre.
On Friday morning we visited the site to confirm a suitable location for the shelter, and begun clearing the proposed site with help from CIDO members Sarin, Sokphea and Poeuch.
Once completed this will provide a flat surface for creating the cement blocks, cover from the rain that that could erode the blocks while curing and, thankfully, shelter from the sun!
It has been great this week to get our hands dirty and see some tangible results, we are very excited to continue working on the project and are looking forward to sharing test results and producing some earth blocks in the next week!
Tom & Sakshi
You can still contribute towards this project via this link: https://mydonate.bt.com/events/greenshoots10nov
