CEB Press

Overview
The "Liberator" Compressed Earth Block Press is a machine that makes compressed earth blocks (CEBs).

The CEB Press takes earth/dirt/soil and compresses it tightly to make solid blocks useful for building. Compressed earth blocks have many advantages as a building material: by making the building materials from the readily available dirt on the building site, they eliminate the need to transport bricks from elsewhere, reducing the financial cost and environmental impact of transport. Compressed earth blocks are very strong and insulate well against both heat and sound, making for very energy-efficient building (especially combined with the energy savings from not needing to transport them from offsite). Best of all, the material they use is already on-site and does not need to be purchased -- quite literally, dirt-cheap! See the wiki page on Compressed Earth Blocks and the CEB category for more details on building using CEBs.

The Liberator has been fully designed and tested by the Open Source Ecology team. Because the Liberator is an open source technology, you can freely download instructions to build your own from materials you can obtain yourself, or contact opensourceecology[at]gmail[dot]com to buy a kit or a finished machine.

Building a machine yourself might seem intimidating, but every step of the process is fully documented and the OSE community is available on our discussion forums if you need help, advice, or a little hand-holding.

Using the CEB Press, two people can build a 6 foot high (1.83m) round wall, 20 feet (6.1m) in diameter, 1 foot (30cm) thick, in one 8 hour day, though construction time will vary somewhat depending on preparation time, what equipment is available (tractor to prepare the ground and move the blocks where they need to go), the quality of the soil, and other factors. The bigger the block size, the faster a wall can be erected, but at the cost of heavier blocks that are more of a strain to work with. Blocks from The Liberator average 25 pounds (11.3kg).

See CEB Design for more information.

Updates

 * Metric CEB Press
 * CEB Press/Videos
 * Field Testing 2011

Status

 * Currently the CEB is at product release status and is being actively manufactured at Factor e Farm and in Texas. The presses will be used heavily as a part of the Factor e Farm Infrastructure Buildout 2011.
 * The CEB documentation is being actively upgraded to meet Fabrication_Procedure_Standards with the goal of serving as a reference implementation for GVCS documentation.
 * Eventually the torch table will be used to automate the fabrication of the CEB machine, reducing fabrication time by an estimated 20 hours and, thus, the cost to build the machine.
 * The first independent replication is in process as of Sep. 2, 2011, by James Slade and Jason Smith in Texas.