Masonry Magazine April 2004 Page. 62
Mixers & DELIVERY SYSTEMS
As you move up the building, your mixer needs to be more compact, portable and environmentally friendly.
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60 Masonry
April 2004
And the Beat Goes on
A FACT OF LIFE on the job site is that environmental regulations and their enforcement are getting more stringent. As you move up a building, floor after floor, you find it makes sense to haul the mixer up rather than walk the mortar to the work. That means your mixer needs to be compact, portable and environmentally friendly.
Jim Swisher, President of Buddy Equipment, Miami, Fla., explains, "Job site inspections are controlling discharge of slurry, and the inspectors on the job are paying a lot more attention to this than they did in years past. At the end of the day, the mason is not allowed to wash out the equipment the way he or she would like. They have to control this mess they make. That means there tends to be more mortar left in the drum at the end of the mixing day. The next morning the worker begins the ritual I call 'dry cleaning' - where the mason takes his or her hammer and beats the drum to loosen any mortar that's left from the day before. Then they dump that out and begin to mix."
Contractor Marco Maffolini of Select Masonry, North Miami Beach, Fla., knows you can't just wash the mixer out at the end of the day, letting that water run down 30 flights of stairs. "We kept finding our mixers at upper floors with no way to clean them at the end of the shift. We could only empty a wheelbarrow of water and slurry; any runoff wasn't allowed. So we had to 'dry clean' the mixer - pound the drum to free up the dried mortar in pieces, load that into the trash chute and then scrape the mixer drum so the paddles wouldn't bind up. It isn't easy, but it meets regulations. That makes the durability and strength of the mixer we use all the more important."
Select Masonry recently bought two mixers from Buddy Equipment, and Swisher thinks he knows why.
"The shape of our drum and the thickness of our material is more resistant than any other mixer on the market," Swisher states. "We put a shape on the back of our drum - we call it eliminating the dead zone that makes the drum so much stronger and resistant to the mason's hammer. When you pound on one side of a piece of steel, in effect you're shot peening it and that tends to deflect and bend the metal. When it bends, it throws off the total alignment of everything in that mixer - things like the paddle shaft or the relationship of the ends of the paddles to the drum. It ultimately causes failure when the bearings fail, the shaft drops, and the paddles can get so out of position that they rub the drum."
Besides the drum shape and its resistance to getting bent out of shape, the Buddy mixer claims to offer higher performance-speed of mixing - than other mixers.
As Swisher says, "You may think you need to own a 12-cubic-foot mixer because you need batches of 12 cubic feet at a time. But with our nine-cubic-foot mixer, you can almost mix two batches in the same amount of time that you would mix one batch in the 12-cubic-footer. So in a similar period of time, from a Buddy, you might realize 18 cubic feet of mixed mortar instead of 12 from the larger, but slower, machine."
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