THIS BRICKMAKING MACHINE MAKES NOTHING BUT MONEY!

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Above and Below: Here's all there is to producing cement bricks with the MMI machine.

MOTHER NO. 46 carried a 30-year-old article by Hi Sibley about a do-it-yourself machine that can produce up to 100 concrete blocks an hour.

Well, that's pretty good. But MOTHER staffers Travis Brock and J. Weiland recently watched a brand-new, super-simple, brickmaking machine near Austin, Texas kick out an incredible 3,500 concrete bricks in just one hour!

That's right . . . 3,500 3" X 3" X 9" concrete bricks in only 60 minutes. And the straightforward apparatus that spewed out all those construction blocks has no motors, no gears, no hydraulic systems, and no other complex hardware. In fact, it's entirely manually operated! And with the production capacity that it has, this little machine is far more than just a unique combination of steel and wood . . . it's a rather fantastic small business all neatly packaged and mounted on three wheels that, if you like, you might even just hitch up to your car and tow home!

FILLING A NICHE

This amazing piece of equipment is the brainchild of Jack Dameron and David and Daniel Dennis, all of Austin. Together, the three men are Methods Manufacturing, Inc . . . . and they've been calling their compact 500-pound machine the "Mobile Maker". David, however, says that MMI is changing the brickmaker's name to "Mold Master" in the States . . . and it's already becoming known as "Adobero" (Mud Mule) in Mexico, where the machine is also being marketed.

It was Dameron who originally sparked the trio into developing the Mold Master. Jack had been working in one end or another of the concrete brick and adobe block business for roughly 20 years, and he was well aware of the need within the trade for just such a contrivance.

Not that MMI's Mud Mule is the first piece of equipment ever developed for the manufacture of concrete bricks or adobe blocks. It's not. A number of other machines and production methods, in fact, have been devised for the fabrication of such construction materials.

Invariably, however, all the other machines and production methods have fallen into two very different categories:

[1] extremely slow and backbreakingly labor-intensive setups in which wooden molds are loaded from wheelbarrows, leveled off with shovels, and then picked up and moved by hand, or

[2] highly automated, complicated, difficult to maintain, and expensive fullfledged production lines.

It's easy to see how the non-labor-intensive, uncomplicated, easy to maintain, inexpensive, and fast Mold Master fills the niche so nicely between the traditional extremes of "too laborious" and "too complex". As MOTHER staffer Travis Brock puts it, "The Mud Mule strikes me as an ideal example of the kind of intermediate technology so many of us are looking for. It's just right for use in a small, decentralized, but very profitable enterprise."