Trying to find a mixer

DIY projects are should be called "BTS" (behind the scenes) or "AOT" (ahead of time). Like an iceberg, the nailing, assembling, creating (i.e. what you see on home improvement tv shows) is small portion of work (and by far the most fun). Most of the work happens before you actually make anything and I think the success of the project is largely determined by the prep.

Today spent several hours on the phone and computer trying to decide which mixer to rent. A critical question - it must be big enough. It's not as easy as it sounds. There is the drum capacity, which tells how much it would hold if you filled it with water and stood it on end. Then there is the mixing capacity which tells how much material you can actually mix in it. This is smaller than the drum capacity. I must be the only person that asks how much concrete the mixer holds because I spoke to several people at three different rental places and the had little or no information on this. When they had a figure, they were unable to tell me if it was drum or mix capacity. Also, they sometimes tell you how many bags it will hold. This is useless because there are bags in 60 (1/2 cubic feet), 80 (2/3 cubic feet), and 90 (3/4 cubic feet) pounds, and there is a measure called a sac used in the construction industry which as best as I can ascertain is about 10 cubic feet. To further complicate matters, the mixing capacity can be measured in liters as well.

I don't understand how people can get the correct mixer without having this information. Our whole job has been fueled by our cubic feet calculation. It was almost the first thing we figured out. I finally decided to go this route when one of the rental people was telling me a 9 cubic foot mixer holds 2 6o pound bags of concrete. Ok, here's how far off he was - the mixer in question will mix 9 cubic feet of concrete. 2 60 pound bags together is 1 cubic foot. I kept asking the question in numerous ways, and he was just clueless.

I ended up calling the rental places and asking for the model numbers of their rental units. The manufacturers usually have pretty good information on their websites. I was absolutely hung up on one mixer though - couldn't make heads or tails of the figures until I figures out they had a typo on the website (they had the information for the next smaller size mixer on the one I was looking at).

The grinder we ordered got here today, and the plan was I was going to grind the first sample we did today. Unfortunately, it got here too late in the day so I'll have to do it first thing tomorrow.