“by Roberto Lou Ma, Civil Engineer, Centro de Experimentación enTecnología Apropiada, Guatemala
The CETA-RAM is a manually operated block press, developed by the author just after the February 1976 Guatemalan Earthquake, specifically for the production of hollow soil-cement building blocks. The hollow blocks are intended for use in reinforced masonry for low cost earthquake resistant housing.The CETA-RAM is a modified version of the well known CINVA-RAM.
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set — a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.
The CEB Story 2012. from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.
Quote from the video: “After this December, there’s going to be major adoption happening as people see this machine works and the quality of the housing that’s built, both in terms of time and cost, is going to be superior.” Marcin Jakubowski, Founder Open Source Ecology
“We’re pleased to announce design completion of Prototype IV of the Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) Press.
We continue to get quite a few inquires about compressed earth blocks / soil-cement blocks. This Mother Earth News article got me excited about pressed earth blocks years ago. It’s an oldie but goodie first-person account of a couple in Arizona who used the soil on their land to make CEB blocks that cost 97 times less than cement blocks.