Bits and Pieces - Newspaper Briquette Maker - Paper Log Maker - Brick Maker - Heavy Duty Steel Press

Ooooh I love this gadget for recycling newspaper and shredded paper. I felt it was well built, solid and made great tight paper logs. I did not find the handles to be flimsy AT ALL, they supported my full weight and felt solidly welded. Instruction sheet was adequate enough, no complaints. Handles could use a bit of padding because it hurts my hands to squeeze, so I am going to wrap them in padded bicycle handlebar tape.Now for my personal procedure illustrated by pics:-Loaded three bags of shredded assorted paper and newspaper ripped into strips or squares (torn by hand) into a 5 gal bucket, topped with water. Stirred by hand well with various implements, best one was a torn 2" sprinkler pipe.-After about 3 days of soaking, set up outside as above, bucket with wet paper well drained, the awesome gadget, some extra newspapers (dry) and my muscles. I used cleaning gloves.-Placed sieve into gadget, sheet newspaper bottom of the sieve, loaded handfuls of the wet/shreds into paper covered sieve, folded over the paper atop the mush, and placed press on top. This makes for a tighter log as specified in instructions. NOTE/HINT: start with a half load for a smaller log to get the hang of it, later you can muscle full loads.-Pressed down on press with a chunk of 2x6 wood first by standing on it, once some of the water was squeezed out, I used the handles to press down until no more water came out. I alternated pressure on the handles which squeezes out half the log, then the other handle for the other half. To the reviewer that got "lobsided" logs, probably the dominant hand was pressing harder than the other.-Repeat until fun is over; I made eight 5" x 5" x 10" logs in about an hour. Laid out to dry on plastic tub tops, then got the bright idea of using some burlap to wrap the logs so little shreds of paper would not fly out into the sunset as they dried. That worked well!-Logs dried in about 5 days (Vegas climate), you can tell they are dry because they get very light to lift and hard to the touch.-Last step! take to cabin in the woods and place in fireplace, burn them. They smell a little funnier than wood but burn great, about one and a half hours to completely burn through. They burn much like "real" logs, that is, outside first then eventually the inside until there is nothing left.Gadget worked perfectly as advertised. I don't know if I would try one of the 4-log gadgets because squeezing the water out of a single log was work. But I will be buying another especially when the summer comes so I can work faster and make more logs in one session.If you have kids, PERFECT PROJECT for them!

I purchased this a couple of weeks ago. It is extremely durable...thick metal, maybe steel?I LOVE it! I shred everything, newspaper, mail, junk mail, envelopes, flyers. Then I dump it all in a trash can with water and let it soak over night. Then I brick away! It takes a bit of muscle and the hardest part is removing the bricks, but it works beautifully!It is messy! I moved the shredder into the garage and keep the trash can out back. As the weather has taken a turn towards fall here, I move them onto a rack in the garage and have a small fan running on them.Because it is so incredibly humid right now, they are taking almost 2 weeks to dry. So this is not something you can use, make the bricks and turn around and burn in a matter of days. I would think, that because they are compacted so tightly, even is no humid sunny weather, they would take a week to dry completely.We do not use these or firewood to heat our home, but I do burn quite a lot of fires in the winter. Since we use newspaper to start our fireplace anyway, this is perfect! And now I don’t have to worry about frozen wood, or wet wood and attempting to start it.

Neat idea, and it works. The press is *just* strong enough to be usable, but it's on the flimsy side. However after doing maybe 20 bricks, I think I'm done with this thing. Here's what I learned:*Let the paper soak for a while so it gets nice and mushy, or the bricks will fall apart. I added a small amount of detergent to the water and this seemed to help.*The water will turn gray and disgusting, and it will become full of what I assume is stone powder. Anywhere the water runs it will leave an unsightly white residue. Like unsightly even outside working in the dirt so that's saying something.*Cardboard works fine for making bricks, and it doesn't have that white powder in it.*Stack up the bricks so they have good airflow and leave them for a few weeks to dry out. If you're patient they dry out fine.*Each brick contain A LOT of paper. If you have a whole recycling bin full of news papers that will only make 6-10 bricks. And each of those doesn't produce more heat than a regular log, probably less. This is ultimately the reason I'm not going to keep using this thing. It's too labor intensive per log, and the heat gains are minimal if you heat your house with wood.*The logs are easy to light, so they are nice for starting a fire. It might be practical to soak them in waste cooking oil, for a very powerful firestarter. I haven't tried that.

Finally got hot enough that could make some paper logs and have the outside heat dry them out. This project can be pretty messy with microcut shredded paper because the paper is so small. First I put the paper in bucket of water for a day, then i would take handles of paper and put it into the log maker and compress them. If you compress this brick really hard it can be difficult to pull the log out, but it will definitely be a nice compressed log. Then i took the logs out and put them on a cookie cooling sheet for airflow and let them dry outside. I really like the product, just takes some plannign to make the logs, but I am glad that i can take mail trash and turn it into heat for the winter.

The handles bent the first time I used them. Thin, cheap metal. Paint chipped off immediately.I guess you get what you pay for. This seems to be more a novelty item than practical.I found standing on the sieve to be more effective. I wonder if building a ramp for my car would be effective; use my car to really press the hell out of the paper….I soaked the shredded paper for two days, lined the sieve compartment with newspaper. I read the instructions. But the logs weren’t very tight at all.I’ll updated once the logs are dry.

It came as described