sheepey-and-flufflepuff-bffs-fan:
If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built, French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s
I’m just gonna go ahead and reblog this for purely educational purposes.
added bonus is that concrete now taste good
Sugar does not really do that.
What you need is citric acid (you get that to get the hard water residues out of your pots/water boiler/washing machine), looks like sugar granules.
Or concentrated vinegar.
Cement needs a high ph to bind properly.
So if you add acid, it won’t properly set and/or needs 3-4 times longer.Speaking as someone who works in the concrete forming industry: the easiest way to severely fuck up any large concrete pour is to delay it at the wrong moment.
If someone is trying to build a huge fuckoff concrete thing – say, for instance, a giant wall – they’re going to need an obscene quantity of concrete, and that’s all going to have to be transported there from the nearest mixing plant. This means they’ll have multiple trucks coming by to decant concrete in consecutive pours while the workers place it and vibrate it to ensure it all intermixes and sets properly, forming a monolithic mass. If one pour is allowed to set before the next one is added, you get a big, ugly, possibly structurally unsound gap between the two called a “cold joint.” A bad enough cold joint can completely fuck your whole project because the next engineer or inspector who sets foot on that site is going to take one look at that motherfucker and immediately embark on a quest for blood vengeance. You will literally have to cut that whole section of wall out, slap some dowels in the nearest structurally sound bits, and re-form and pour the offending segment from scratch, which represents a fortune in cost overruns and will make everyone involved very upset. This is an especially bad problem in hot climates, because the concrete curing process is exothermic – that stuff sets much faster when it’s really hot out, and its 28-day compressive strength tends to be poorer as well.
So if, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to completely shit up a wannabe dictator’s enormous unfeasible poured concrete vanity project, you could literally just randomly hassle and delay every concrete truck on its way there. Dude’s gonna end up with a giant worthless pile of shitty crumbling concrete and exposed reinforcing steel, and an army of pissed-off contractors to boot.
reblogging for purely educational purposes nothing more
Reblogging this here, since we previously reblogged the inaccurate version.
according to Concrete Construction.net a small amount of sugar is used delibarately to slow setting by 4 hours (but actually increases strength.) Higher amounts of sugar delay setting longer, but we in delibarate use cases we are talking mixtures of 0.1%-0.3% if I understood correctly. So going off of the comment on cold joints, one assumes that if some of the trucks were sugared and some weren’t then they wouldn’t set at the same time causing the crumbling concrete they described.
essentially the point is to make it set at uneven rates so that it crumbles or is at risk of crumbling
Don’t forget to save some sugar for the gas tank of the cars and construction vehicles. It isn’t as damaging as the legends say, but it’ll sure prevent the vehicle from being operable for a while.
good to know
Reblogging for … science I swear.