• cloudshouter@lemmy.zip
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    10 hours ago

    Put a couple packets of sugar in about two quarts of leftover bag concrete once just to see how it went. Initially it acted like it had plasticizer and got loose and wet again. A day or two later it was acting like it had just set and a month later I could still crumble the edges off with my thumb.

    Problems with using this for sabotage. Any serious project will have an engineer checking every truck and it will not pass unless the person adding water at the plant was in on it and did some very good calculations. Then the saved samples would immediately give them away in the investigation. During and after the pour there are too many people watching. I would have to say putting brown sugar and salt in the footing trenches the night before it’s poured or spraying (big puddles will get drained) a solution on top of the plastic to look like rain or dew.

  • Famko@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    IIRC from my material science course, if you really want to fuck up a batch of concrete, you should use salt instead of sugar, cause it’ll crack the concrete with every freeze and thaw cycle.

    • rhombus@sh.itjust.works
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      1 hour ago

      It’s the same as with the sugar, you need a lot of it to make much of a difference. Unless it’s reinforced concrete, then the salt in the water will corrode the steel rebar and that will definitely cause cracking.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    How much wall does one tonne of concrete give you? Seems like you need tonnes of sugar to properly do this

    • Nora (She/Her)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      16 hours ago

      It doesn’t! (ish)

      Sugar can slow down the hardening of concrete, but this is too small of a concentration and even if you do increase the concentration it still hardens which (depending on the application) does not ruin it.

      • Jiggle_Physics@quokk.au
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        15 hours ago

        Yes from what I can find, depending on the type of concrete, it takes 4-30lbs of sugar per ton. The point is not to keep it permanently plastic, it will set, but its structural integrity is greatly compromised and it will crumble under stresses far, far, lower than it will need to deal with.

          • Nora (She/Her)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            13 hours ago

            Well no because the other part of this that isnt talked about is… concrete is heavy as fuck, and one ton of concrete is basically nothing size wise. Its more like you have to throw 200lbs of sugar in every truck that arrives at the job site, often with many many trucks.

            • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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              8 hours ago

              That was the red flag when I read this. After letting a few footings for a porch I started till captures how many tins must go into a garage floor slab, let alone a prison in billionaire bunker.

      • Nora (She/Her)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        15 hours ago

        There’s like a thousand caveats to this though just as an aside. If someone realizes the concrete is tampered with, they’re probably tossing the whole batch. It’s better to be safe than sorry and they probably don’t have time to wait for the lab report on what got added to the mix without their permission.

        Not that I’m recommending that people do this, but if you wanted to fuck up concrete I’d think going for a compound that makes it cure faster would be the way to go. Too fast leads to more heat which leads to fractures in the concrete from the intense heat.

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          Salt. Salt will completely fuck concrete.

          There were Chinese construction companies that cut corners and used beach sand instead of more expensive river sand.

          The buildings the made are all called Tofu towers or something similar, because you can walk up to the ones still standing and pull chunks off, like they were made of tofu.

          • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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            8 hours ago

            So you really just need a few huge empty bags of salt/sand/rice/etc, then get caught sneaking out of the mixing plant.

    • bacon_pdp@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      When sugar is added to Portland cement paste at the onset of mixing, hardening may be delayed indefinitely.

      Sugar is added to concrete to delay delay curing and improve compressive strength but after 0.06% sugar by weight, compressive strength starts to decrease and after 0.08% sugar by weight setting times dramatically increase.

      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. This was used by the French anarchists to resist prison construction.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        11 hours ago

        I’m assuming this is AI generated misinformation that pulled incorrect information from all the reposts. Please stop doing this. AI doesn’t know anything and only repeats stuff that is said frequently, which is often wrong, like this case.

  • Skyrmir@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    You’d need at least 10lbs of sugar per ton of concrete, probably closer to 40. If it’s a full truck it’s probably around 800lbs of sugar to ruin the load.

  • Impractical_Island@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    You can pour sugar in a car’s gas tank, it will really fuck up the car. Go ahead, test it with your neighbors. They will be pissed af, but as long as you don’t have a flock camera around, just walk up with a mask n shit and they ain’t knowing whst you do if you don’t do what is that you be, obviously.