Dear Richard, We might start to produce some charcoal dust briquettes, to complete our institutional stove activity. Another company we work with has a motorized extruder for clay. I think the director bought it in Ghana, only the adaptor is missing, so he might be interested by your adaptor! He is also interested in producing briquettes.
As for our NGO, we are now looking for an easy-to-make and cheap press. We are seeking minimal investment, and production on a small scale at first. >From our institutional stoves, we already have a workshop with a lot of space, drying areas which are used for the stoves clay, but have more than enough space to welcome briquettes. I studied the market and made a few calculations, charcoal dust is cheap, clay is cheap, paper is free. Workforce will be the major cost. We might be able to produce briquettes costing only a bit more than half the charcoal price. I found great info on how to setup a project from PERACOD: http://www.peracod.sn/spip.php?rubrique4 Shaping the briquettes by hands is time consuming and then too costly, so only the press lacks. I wasn't able to find a sausage maker or a pellet press on the main markets and construction stores or stores where machine tools are sold. Vendors say there's no demand, therefore no offer for these machines. Usually, welders make the machine tools on demand. They need to see first the machine they will copy, and they charge a high price. We have a team of two welders and material, so we could make a simple press such as this one (my favorite) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs0D_aVtgq8 I found this video inspiring, so we made a kind of small hand press, costing absolutely nothing, able to press 6 small cube briquettes at once. The mold is made of 30X30 mm square iron tubes. You take the mold in the left hand, and the pressing device in right hand, the latter being made of round iron and 2mm thick iron sheets. I will try it today and see how fast it makes briquettes. Charcoal briquettes with clay do not need such a high pressure. Funny enough, I saw just now that the inventor of the first press also made a iron tubes version, with the same principle. It doesn't press 6 but 25 briquettes in a single push! He says it is the fastest of all hand presses! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_LW38THm2s You recently said there were more than 25 briquette presses of all kind. I saw the presses designed by the Legacy Foundation: http://bioenergylists.org/en/legacypresses Are they suited to 80% charcoal dust, 10% clay, 10% paper? Do you know how much briquettes or kilos per type of material can be produced per hour for the different presses? I think the economic viability will depend on this factor. Would you recommend one press in particular? By the way, I wasn't able to access the Legacy Foundation website. Do you know if it works at the moment? Cheers, Xavier ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2011 22:45:48 +0100 From: Richard Stanley <[email protected]> To: Stoves and biofuels network <[email protected]> Subject: [Stoves] sausage maker adaptor for manual briquette presses Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" For all you pellet, sausage-size-biomass fuel-needing stovers, we are playing with an adaptor for the conventional batch-fed cylinder press to allow one to make multiple quantities of anything from sausage sizes down to pellets. The idea is being co-vented as we speak and its very much 'open-source', so please , feel free to dive in with design thoughts, all. Although in this sketch, I suggest using metal pipes welded together, there is in retrospect, little reason it could not be made out of just a cylindrical block of wood. In this design you would not be pushing the piston completely through the cylinder (as you do with many of the conventional briquette.presses) The material would just be coming out the tubes and breaking off (or, it could be cut off) at a certain length. Please be first on the block to try it out. If it can work for you, it will help many with their many different types of briquette presses, in the network. Basi Haya, na aluta Continua, Richard www.legacyfound.org Arusha Tanzania _______________________________________________ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://www.bioenergylists.org/
