I went to Harare last week to have Molly’s stitches removed and to see a man about a machine.

Our Bamba brick press is a great machine, it uses manual labour creating jobs and not polluting the environment, as well for rural areas, small communities and individual jobs as it is manual there is no cost of fuel or finding fuel to think of , which sounds small but is HUGE, it doesn’t produce waste, it uses the soil dug up from the ground, the bricks interlock so there is no use of mortar and brick force (mesh that holds the bricks together), the bricks come with 2 holes from top to bottom to allow for piping and electrical eliminating the need for chasing, and the list goes on.

The downside to the Bamba brick press is we are all first time users and it’s been a learning curve for all of us, the manual is very nice and helpful but there is no problem solving information. We have a contact in South Africa who has a machine but hasn’t used it since the late 1990’s and the machine came out in 1995. The Bamba company doesn’t exist anymore, which I have a few theories about and will explain that situation later. We have what I believe is a Friday machine, this means the machine was made on a Friday when all the workers were thinking about going home and having a beer and spending the next 2 days with families or whatever and weren’t really paying attention to what they were doing. The machine itself we’ve had a few issues, we’ve had to weld cracks, add extra bits to make the job easier, it has to be oiled and greased every 10 or so bricks, etc. The brick size is meant to be 300x150x150 ours is 300x180x150, that’s a 20% difference in height, which you might think isn’t much but creates an issue in terms of integrity of a wall. The original size is that the length is twice the width and height so the structural integrity and weight distribution evens out and there isn’t stress in any particular area but with a 20% difference this makes the brick means there is more stress in the height. This doesn’t cause big issues but it’s something we had to consider. Also because the bricks are compressed manual you have to be very precise EVERY brick to make sure it’s perfect if it isn’t then the bricks don’t fit exactly like they should and we’re in trouble. Sometimes parts of the brick at the top or bottom stick to the machine and don’t come off, this can be due to too much moisture in the mix or the machine not being oiled enough. All these little variables that make a HUGE difference.

So I went to Harare to see a man about a machine, the contractor and I had thought about using a hydraulic engine and attaching it to the manual machine in order to a) make bricks faster, we make 140 a day, with hydraulics we could make 1500 a day, b) the compression would be even and each brick would come out the same. We need about 18000 bricks for this project and we’ve done just over 10200 in 6 months. The machine would be a new creation and make the machine more versatile, it could be manual or hydraulic creating options. So back to my theory why Bamba doesn’t exist anymore technology as we all know has come a long way in the last 16 years, why make bricks manual when you can make them hydraulically, it would save on time and money, plus you would have consistent bricks and take away the possibility of human error. So the man in Harare had a hydraulic interlocking brick press that he couldn’t afford to buy and thought I might be able to buy it. You can take a look at it at www.hyrdaform.com model m7twind. If you buy the machine new, including having it imported from South Africa and pay one of their workers to come to train you for 2 weeks it’s $50,000. If you buy this second hand one with a local worker to train you for 2 weeks it’s $12,000. A HUGE difference, this machine is a dual chamber meaning it makes 2 bricks at a time, you control what compression strength you want as well as the how much to compress the bricks, etc. The downside to this machine is the bricks are smaller, there are no holes for utilities and it’s a very different style of brick to what we are already using and the big one WE DON’T HAVE $12,000!!! I was originally told the man owned the machine and we were talking about renting it out for us to better our machine. Also as the hydraform has dual chambers the hydraulic engine is bigger than the size of the machine we have, where would we put it and how would we attach it??? So it was a nice idea but not what we need, so we’ll keep plugging away and perfecting the system we have and continue to learn about our manual brick press.