About four years ago, the boys and I played with making adobe bricks. Our soil is adobe and so it only made sense.
I once lived on a farm in Southwest Kansas that had a huge chicken coop that was built with adobe bricks. Knowing some of the history of the farmstead and it’s original occupants, I’m assuming they made the bricks and plastered the building themselves.
The above brick is made from adobe soil with a paper pulp binder, no sand or straw. Dirt was from my front yard. It’s much lighter than the pure adobe bricks we made. It easily survived the drop test from a four foot hight onto concrete and has been left outside in the elements unprotected for the last four years.
For what it’s worth I let the pulp drain until water stopped dripping from it, I then put equal part soil and pulp together and mixed it together in a bucket by hand, until it turned into mud. I didn’t need to add extra water but you may, if you try it like I did.
We was going make enough to build a small greenhouse, however life took an unexpected turn and pretty much all plans were put on hold.
I’d picked up a brick mold online for a relatively decent price. Originally I got it to make paper bricks to burn in the fireplace. Which I tried, but it left behind far more ash than I was expecting.
The mold makes a normal sized brick and I think compressing it harder helps makes the brick stronger. Though I may be wrong.
There are quite a few videos on youtube about adobe bricks and making them, I’d suggest watching at least a few before starting, I did it on a whim and it took a bit to get it right
Once you get it down there won’t be much you can’t build with the bricks, though after building you may want to plaster over the bricks, or seal them somehow to protect them excess moisture. There are several ways of doing this so researching before making the bricks might be a good idea.
Below is a link to a video that gives some basics. If I was to make a mold like they have I would put two blocks on each end instead of only one on the parts used to compress the bricks. Or perhaps even use a few chunks of 4X4 instead instead of the short pieces of 2X4 to compress the bricks.
Once you get started you’ll figure out how you want to do it fairly quickly, if your building any sort of structure, even a dog house you should look up how to properly test the strength of your adobe bricks.
Best of luck in all your ventures.
Slocum's Creak 