THIS BRICKMAKING MACHINE MAKES NOTHING BUT MONEY!

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[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."

WHAT IT IS

The MMI machine is a marvel of simplicity. It consists of little more than a many-pocketed wooden mold mounted in a heavyduty steel frame. A hopper-designed to roll back and forth-is mounted on the same frame. And when that hopper is filled with concrete mix (called "mud" in the trade) or real adobe mud and then run across the ganged-up individual molds ... it automatically fills and levels them off, all at once!

As the accompanying photos show, the heavy steel frame that is the backbone of the Mold Master is mounted on three wheels. And a single lever on the rear of the frame raises and lowers it so that the gang-mold can be dropped to the ground for filling . . . and then lifted high enough to clear a fresh batch of bricks as the machine is moved on to another "squatting" spot. Furthermore, as the Mud Mule is towed along, it automatically rolls out a long strip of plastic for batch after batch of the fresh blocks to cure on. (Devilishly clever, these Austin boys!)

WHAT IT MAKES

If you decide to feed one of these little brickmakers with truckloads of concrete from a ready-mix plant, two people can supply all the man- or womanpower you'll really need to operate the machine. And those two people won't be limited to the manufacture of just concrete bricks or (when the Mold Master's hopper is filled with real mud) adobe blocks. Simply by changing its molds, this versatile piece of equipment can also turn out artificial rocks, stepping stones, patio tiles, and possibly even concrete fenceposts.

None of the items produced by the MMI machine, of course, are the energy-intensive "fired" ceramic bricks, etc., that you sometimes see used in construction. Instead, they're all molded from colored concrete (a "3-1/2 bag mix" with no aggregate larger than pea-sized-ask any concrete man what that means if you don't know-works well). The bricks, blocks, etc., can be made in almost any color you choose (earthy tones are very popular) and are frequently used as veneer on wood-framed, ranchstyled dwellings.

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