Cement Australia is well known for its high-quality pre-mixed products – cements, cement blends, mortars, renders and just-add-water mixes. But a lot of tradies on bigger projects prefer a more bulk-order approach, having sand delivered which they then add to their cement.
Cement Australia has this option more than covered with its consistently highperformance General Purpose cement and General Blended cement, including customised blends for special applications. Cement Australia maintains a Product Per formance and Technology (PP&T) team providing oversight and support for varied cement and cementitious materials. Customers can utilise the company’s technical knowledge for guidance on mix design, compliance and despatched materials specifications and performance. Cement Australia also maintains an independent construction-materials testing laboratory accredited with the National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA) Australia. Cement Australia recognises the value in supporting its customers with technical knowledge, enabling them to achieve maximum performance with the least waste. Along with sales and technical specialists, PP&T provides national support to bulk customers.
One of the things I love about Cement Australia is the fact it’s made right here in Australia, and when you buy its products, you’re supporting Aussie jobs!
To help out with this tough test we caught up with Blake Cooper from Northern Beaches Stone. Blake specialises in all types of stone construction and restoration, including pressure-cleaning sandstone and re-pointing cracked mortar joints. But for this test he and his team were laying a large area of stone perfect for putting Cement Australia’s General Purpose cement to the test.
TEST #1: THE MIX
Working on big projects requires everything to be scaled up, but Blake and his team decided to operate with smaller half-bag mixes into a barrow for this site. Blake’s thoughts on the quality of the mix are interesting.
“The Cement Australia product has come up great,” he floated. “It’s fluffy and has a really nice level of stick to it without being hard to work with.
“The consistency is really nice. It feels a bit more rustic than some other products we have used, so it will work very well with the heavier sections of stone we deal with, day in, day out.
“The boys all seemed to really like it, which is great news”
TEST #2: WORKABILITY
Getting the mix perfect with cement products is a must. The right consistency allows the team to work efficiently and smoothly and get the most work completed with the best possible finish.
It was amazing to watch these boys work so well with each other, but knowing the quality of of Blakey’s previous work I wasn’t surprised. The product mix was epic, and the team absolutely smashed it.
Blake summed up the Cement Australia gear: “It seems to have that really nice balance of being easy to work with, but at the same time offering great support to the stone. One of the boys mentioned it didn’t feel asgluey as some other products, but it still had plenty of stick. The last thing masons want is an overly firm product that wrecks wrists, forearms and hands by the end of the day.
“The Cement Australia General Purpose cement has ticked all the boxes for us, so we are pretty happy”
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
The excellent quality of the work produced by Blake and his team, along with the positive feedback about the mix, spoke for itself.
If the mix isn’t right or the cement isn’t behaving as expected it’ll be obvious pretty quickly with a team of 6. But it was all smiles on this day as the product produced excellent results.
With such great feedback from Blake and his team it’s no wonder more and more tradies are deciding to move over to an Australian-made, high-quality product like Cement Australia General Purpose cement, along with its epic range of other prepackaged products.
Visit: www.cementaustralia.com.au