GG, I suspect I have personally wheeled more barrows of concrete than you have, and have physically mixed plenty of concrete and mortar in various manual ways over a period of 45 years including hand mixing and the good old concrete mixer without a motor.
Your presumption is that I haven't messed with concrete. As I say, your racists do make stereotype assumptions.
My most arduous concrete wheel barrowing was on a continuous slip form on 6pm to 6am shifts with no [and I mean no] meal breaks etc. The concrete just kept coming up the hoist. Peeing was over the side. Food was grabbed and chewed while waiting for the next skip of concrete to arrive. That was the good old days. My body would collapse before long if I tried that now.
The reason for simplifying the mix in the example we are discussing was to better explain how the volume of cement is small compared with the volume of finished concrete which was the point of the whole discussion.
The point was, in case you missed the discussion, was that a ship of cement doesn't produce a ship volume of concrete. It produces a lot more; not because the cement makes up the volume but because the aggregate which actually makes up the volume does.
Chairman Mao thought all that book learnin stuff was no good too, and sent the book learners out to the boondocks to engage in good honest labour doing nothing much of value as real education.
Our neighbour in Antwerp was a solid state physicist whose multiple pages of maths looked akin to Arabic to me and I have done pretty decent maths. He showed me what he was up to when we were chatting about things. His friend was an optical fibre producer. I explained that they were sitting on a fortune with the coming of cyberspace if he could get solid state data storage and move tsunamis of data through pipes [that was in 1987].
Without those professorial academic theoreticians who enable actual fibre to be produced, ElM and your concrete manual workers are useless even if they dig great trenches and pour some dodgy looking concrete [ElM's photos of concrete just poured].
BTW, it's a ball-peen hammer not a ball pine hammer.
Anyway, so now you understand how a ship full of cement gives lots more concrete than a ship full but that the cement and water hide in the interstices of the aggregate so contribute little to the volume of concrete. That was the point of the discussion, not that you know how to mix some poor quality concrete.
Mqurice
PS: Come to think of it, I am due to fill a hole I dug for a gate post a couple of weeks ago with concrete. I have the ingredients in the shed. I have put it off due to foul weather and swine flu - be warned, it's a vicious bug and people in NZ have been coughing for weeks. Not particularly fatal, but you really won't like the cough that comes with it. Deep in the lungs and hanging on. I haven't seen anything like it [experienced it] ever.
In NZ, concrete is a way of life. Well, it used to be - these days it's all suburbia. |
