Mixing Equipment
On a construction site there are generally two types of mixing going on: cement and paint. Cement for the foundation, the driveway, the sidewalk, etc and paint for the appearance of the house or building.Cement Mixers
Mixing up cement for whatever job you have in mind is not a hard task. It is however a heavy task and also pretty time consuming. First you need the water, then you need the sand, then the cement, then where are you going to pour the cement? Lifting up buckets of water or bags of cement is backbreaking work. A lot of people decide to go with portable cement mixers as having a cement truck parked in front of your house just feasible sometimes.
A cement mixer has two main components, the drum and the propellers. The drum is the barrel-type thing where water, sand and cement are poured. It is your mixing bowl. The propeller is your wooden spoon to stir the cement with. A little trivia – 95% of industrial mixing applications use left hand propellers because this creates a downward flow to produce better mixing. Another fairly common piece of equipment is a suction strainer. Suction strainers prevent small particles from entering and damaging the mixing system and are usually made of stainless steel wire cloth.
Some jobs require a very small amount of cement and for these there are smaller portable mixers. You just pour in some water, a 60 lb. bag of concrete pre-mix and then roll it around on the ground for about a minute. Simple enough.
For larger jobs you can turn a Bobcat loader in a cement mixer with an attachment mixer. This enables you to mix and pour without having to lift. To keep the cement moving at all times, the drum rotates.
Paint Mixers
Paint mixing is similar to cement mixing but the object is to get the color even so that you do not wind up with half of your house Antique Rose and the other 1985 Hot! Pink. Also instead of the propeller action, paint is shaken. Since it is thinner and on a much smaller scale, shaking is fine. Imagine trying to shake an 80 pound drum of cement.
Paint mixers are basically small canisters and the most important feature is the sealing mechanism on the lid for obvious reasons. It is important that the lid is leak resistant and not prone to swelling or sticking. Another feature to look for when purchasing a paint mixer is the phrase ‘easy-to-clean'. If you cannot get your mixer and the spout clean then all future jobs will always have a slight hint of that Antique Rose!
A general rule of paint mixing –when using higher viscosity paints go with lower volumes and lighter paints are ok to mix in higher volumes.