John's Alu Profile build

[Evengravy]

Okay,

So a bit of progress. I slowly managed to get the walls built for this machine base. I ended up mixing small batches of my previous glass reinforced mortar mix, essentially just scaled up to larger batches and continued building one layer at a time, leaving a couple of hours between layers to allow mortar to go off slightly.

I ended up with 3.5 blocks long per layer and five layers high in total, to bring it roughly to waist level. I began by pre-cutting the granite/concrete blocks with a diamond disk on the 4" grinder and cut around the circumference in the centre, blocks were then easily separated into pretty clean halves through some brute force with a bolster and club hammer. It doesn't take a huge amount of effort in reality. I certainly won't win any awards for my block laying skills, but this mortar is more difficult to work with tidily than regular mortar due to the glass fibre input. It should be worth the effort I feel as it is tough stuff, so I don't see any issues with it. It should mostly be under compression here so hopefully shrinkage will be a non issue later. We'll see I suppose.

I tended to try and keep the mixture on the drier side. It is more difficult to manage that way but I feel this will be a good approach in terms of the overall strength. The water volumes are only a guideline really, in practice each batch will differ slightly so half is added, and gradually added there after to avoid making it too wet. With the super-plasticiser it's easy to overshoot the water addition and end up with a mix which has too much flowability.



I ended up leaving some space around the perimeter in order to facilitate access and to allow sufficient room for any future enclosure.



Thanks Clive for the heads up on SBR, I've purchased a gallon of that to treat the floor and paint it later. I'll likely get the messy 'table-top' casting out of the way before I do that though. That's the next job on the list.