Compressed Paper Bricks

One day when bringing up the YouTube main page, there was a video thumbnail displayed with the title something about unlimited fuel for fires, and showed a bucket. Intrigued, I clicked on it, and it ended up being about a fellow who came up with an inexpensive way to press paper into burnable bricks using Home Depot buckets!

Here’s his video:

Nice! Simple and inexpensive…right up my alley! With all of the feed bags we have, I thought I’d give this a go!

Here’s the drilled out bucket:

Then drawing the pressing block on a left-over piece of 2×12:

And the circle drawn:

Then being cut:

And finally cut out:

After putting the drilled out bucket in another bucket, I added water and paper. We’ve been tearing up the feed bags, along with snail-mail waste, and old doctrinally-incorrect books we’ve had laying around 🙂 I’ve been letting it sit all day and over night:

I didn’t think I could make the saw blade device he made, but found a left-over broken goat lead tether we had laying around:

And using that, it actually works pretty well to mulch up the paper:

Here the drilled-out bucket is stacked on the other bucket ready for pressing:

And here the pressing block is set:

Then a third bucket is set on that, and here, in first attempts, a cinder block to try to get it started:

And then me laying on the cinder block:

And here’s the result when I tried to sit on that. Oops 🙂 :

But, coming up with a better way, I put a board across the pressing bucket, and am able to sit on it now no problem:

And then, I tried putting a couple of feed bags on top, which frees me up for most of the pressing process — I just come back later and sit on it a bit to finish it off:

And here’s the result!

They fit nicely on the bucket lids, so here are several drying in the sun:

And several finished ones:

The only thing left is to try them once we get to where we’re using the wood burner this winter. It’ll be fun and interesting to see how they work!

Hopefully they will, and we’re thankful to the Lord for granting this idea to maybe be able to use some of the extra resources we have for good use!

— David