Founder, Gayle Parsons, sums up the Summer Print week by week.
WEEK 3
After the last 2 weeks of full-on learning we dialled down the pace a little this week.
3 volunteers joined us, Izzy, Kathryn, and Basama, all young women aged between 16 and 24, eager to learn more about the project and willing to help us with the laborious process of preparing the earth for printing.
The prep process involves breaking up the excavated earth, putting it into a grinder, sieving it through a metal mesh to reduce it down to 3mm aggregate size, and then wheelbarrowing it into a storage area.
They also helped with reducing the length of the straw fibre by pushing water-soaked straw through a garden mulcher. This is not an ideal solution but one that we have found does work despite being very time-consuming…..but we’ll try using the leaf blower next week.
Bringing young volunteers onto the site means preparing additional health and safety documentation, and making sure they understand the dangers that there inevitably are on site. Its a good exercise for us also, to ensure we reduce all the risks and hazards as much as possible.
No 3D printing this week as we’ve been working on generating the test methodology for the mixes and different additives we are going to be trialling (Megan) and getting the site a bit more ship-shape so it functions more smoothly (Gayle).
