5 cubic foot cement mixer

I have three mixers of different sizes, and unless we are mixing mason cement we do not even consider mixing ourselves. There is alot of hastle getting the cement---most we get nowdays has large lumps in it as it has set for years at the lumber yard. Hauling gravel & sand & cement takes time, and is a pain usualy. I always have to add the labor costs also. Most times we have something over on the cement plant manager that we can threaten them with to knock off the small load charges, and if you pour late afternoon that may conflict with happy hour, the drivers will give you a lot of extra cement so they do not have to make a return trip. We get alot of small pours with out charge at all if we can pour at the correct time with over run concrete from big pours. It is very supprising what fellow man will do as a favor if you treat them well in all dealings.

2 parts water is way too much.

This recipe was told to me by a farmer who did a lot of concrete work for his new dairy barn using a p.t.o. mixer.

My brother-in-law and I poured more square footage than that in a day easily enough, but it was sidewalk and patio sections---no section over 4' wide, as I remember. I've poured patio sections over half that big by myself several times, but I generally tried to keep it to manageable proportions when I could. All that shovelling, and hauling, and screeding, and finishing, and cleanup gets exhausting.

I have a 5 cu ft mixer I bought 30+ years ago which has mixed hundreds of yards of concrete (and mortar.) On any job large enough to justify the time I used to try to knock together a platform for it to stand on so that I could tip it vertically enough to get a clean pour into a 6' wheelbarrow. A few years ago I fabricated some entensions that bolt on to the frame so that it stands about 8" higher than they way it was built.

The ideal arrangement for mixing is to have the mixer next to the sand and gravel and be standing on something high enough so that you don't have to lift the shovel too high to toss the stuff into the mixer. The wheelbarrow is loaded on the other side. You might think you want to set up your pour so that you can dispense with the wheelbarrow and dump the mixer directly into the form, but moving the mud along the ground is actually much harder than wheeling it even a short distance.

If you end up mixing much concrete with a mixer you'll come to realize that it makes sense to find a way to reduce every element to the least possible effort. There's a sort of primitive satisfaction involved in doing it the hard way, but it doesn't take long before you find that you're old much sooner than you had to be. That's been my experience, anyway.

All the best, Stan