
The concrete powder is available in most home improvement stores in your local community. You can find almost every type of concrete in the market that varies in weight, components, color, and texture. Some are a bit pricey while you can also find some types, affordable. But if you wonder if you can craft your concrete powder using some of the ingredients that you can find in your backyard, the answer is yes. You can make your concrete powder mix from scratch.
Ancient people made their own homemade concrete using different materials that are freely available in nature. You too can craft your homemade concrete by looking for some basic materials in your backyard or home. You can also buy individual ingredients from your hardware or home improvement store. The choice is yours!
Learn how to make your concrete mix for any of your home improvement projects. Keep on reading to know the necessary steps and ingredients in crafting your concrete mix.
Before getting started, let’s define some important words that you will often encounter in this article:
Concrete
This refers to the mixture of water, cement, and aggregates that hardens over time to resemble a solid object or building structure.
Cement
It’s a pulverized limestone that undergoes an extremely hot temperature to remove the CO2. It is used as a binder for construction that hardens and sticks to other materials like sand and gravel.
Mortar refers to the combination of water, sand, lime, and cement.
For crafting your cement, you will need some limestone, but if the material is nowhere to be found, you can substitute it with oyster shells or seashells. These shells will also need to undergo some heating process to extract and get rid of the CO2.
In most cases, limestone is mostly found in your backyard, garden or anywhere in nature, you just need to know how to identify it. There are a couple of methods you can use to check if your rock is limestone or not. The first one is to pour some vinegar or acid in a container and put the rocks on it. Observe if the vinegar makes a feeble cracking or popping sound, and you see some bubbles.
Crafting Your Cement
- If you are lucky to find some limestones, gather them together.
- Wear your protective gear like a respirator and working gloves.
- Set your oven or kiln into a very high temperature. The hotter the better. You will be using this high temperature for a longer period, that’s why you need to add more fuel to keep the fire running. You don’t have to use real fuel. If fuel is not available, you can have a more natural alternative like woods. The idea is to keep the fire going.
- Break your limestones into smaller pieces. The smaller it gets, the easier for the heat to penetrate and work. Larger limestones will require more time and heating capacity, which is not practical.
- When the temperature is extremely hot, you can put your limestones in. Make sure that the heat or temperature is extreme. Burning of limestone to produce a cement requires a very high temperature for a long time to remove the CO2.
- Leave the limestones on the kiln or over for a few hours until they completely disintegrate.
- After a while, you can take the limestones out and let them cool.
- After allowing the limestones to cool, check if each one of them is evenly crumbled into pieces. If you see harder and less crumbly pieces, place them in a container and repeat the process two to six. You have to set the oven or kiln again and go over the entire heating process until every piece of your limestone completely disintegrates. If you don’t want to repeat the same process due to time constraints, you can simply throw away the more solid limestones. The idea here is to use the crumbled ones.
Crafting Your Concrete
Now that you have your homemade cement powder. It’s now time to create your concrete powder.
- Get your aggregates ready. It could be sand, gravel, or crushed stones. If you want a finer powder, you can use sand instead of coarse materials.
- In your wheelbarrow or mixing container, combined two parts of sand for every one part of limestones. You can use a concrete mixer if you have one. Otherwise, you can use a shovel as an alternative. Make sure that the mixture is even.
- After mixing your limestone cement and sands, add four parts of gravel or crushed brick for every one part of it. These materials act as aggregates also that helps the concrete bind together once it dries. Just select finer gravel or smaller pieces of crushed stones.
- Mix them together until everything is well-incorporated.
Now you have the homemade concrete powder that you can use for any concrete project.