No, what you see in the picture above is not a gigantic homemade mortar, it is in fact, a DIY cement mixer made with mostly recycled parts. These include the mixer body, which is an old pickle barrel, and a wheel bearing from a minivan that wasn’t nearly as worn out as originally suspected. The wheels also look quite cool on this cement-wheelbarrow, given their beefy-looking six-bolt wooden axles!
The frame is made out of wood, which seems simple enough, but the driving mechanism is quite a bit more interesting in my opinion. It uses a wooden planetary gearset with a ratio of 58:7, designed using a gear generator program by Matthias Wandel. The gears are driven using an electric motor, reduced with a very large driving pulley. Since the creator of this project didn’t have a lathe big enough to route a groove in this gigantic pulley, he instead temporarily set up a router on the outer diameter of his pulley to do the job.
The resulting wooden contraption looks quite good, as seen in the video below. It is definitely keeping the cement inside it stirred up, although the first few seconds of the clip might leave you feeling a little disoriented!
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