To briefly explain the concept to someone that has never seen a block making facility it is similar in overall concept to a bakery that makes cookies. It all starts with the blending of your ingredients into a blender. In the block industry we call the blender a mixer. First, the ingredients of sand, 3/8” rock, Portland cement, water, optional colors and special additives (admixtures that enhance the properties of the concrete mix) are loaded into the mixer. They are then thoroughly mixed and dispensed in many different ways to the cookie cutter or what we call in the block industry the block machine. The block machine, like a cookie cutter has different shapes and sizes of dies and can make a wide variety of thickness, widths and lengths of products. These dies (molds) can be taken in and out of the machine depending on the product you want to make that day.
All the cookies (Concrete products CMU’s) are made on cookie sheets or what we call in the industry, production pallets which are used to transfer the freshly made products either into racks or other stacking methods to a curing room. The curing room is the oven to the bakery but we don’t necessarily bake the products in the concrete industry. We just want them to cure in an atmospherically controlled area overnight. The next morning the concrete products CMU’s are taken away from the curing room and either manually or fully automatically palletized onto wooden shipping skids. The empty production pallets that the CMU’s were produced on are then returned to the block machine and reused in the next day’s production sequence.