It is designed to mix one 50 pound bag of readimix concrete.
It does that quite well.
It does not work as well for light weight materials like tufa as they stick to the sides.
The only solution is to use more water which weakens your tufa.
So if you want to mix concrete in small batches it works well. Kids love rolling it around for you. They feel so proud they can help make concrete. :)

I have one of these things and found it useless! You spend a lot of time rolling only to open and find that ingredients are not mixed thoroughly; then you spend a lot of time cleaning it out (the 'fins' sort of make it hard to get everything out); and after only one season of using it the rubber seal had gone kafluey (the way rubber does) and no longer sealed the thing watertight so it leaks when ya roll it. Not worth the money! In fact I've been wondering what to do with mine (some alternative use for it?)

Longlocks

P.S. It may be designed to mix one 50 pound bag of readimix concrete but when did you ever see a 50 lb bag of crete? Generally it comes in 40, 60 or 80 lb bags! (I've never even seen a 50 lb bag of readimix stuff). Also even only mixing a smaller 40 lb bag did not produce good results. Much easier to mix in a mason's barrow or tub where you can SEE what is mixed and what is not.

Mine leaks also. Red and brown streaks across the deck don't look good. I will use it to mix my dry ingredients first then use my 5 gallon bucket or wheelbarrow.
Paws

I'm glad that I asked first becouse needed it for tufa and leaf casting:). Definitly won't buy it now.
Thank you all very much!

It's biggest drawback is that it doesn't mix concrete well in the way that ***WE*** are using it. You need to use too much water to get it to mix, and the result is too wet for what most of us are doing, which seems to be castings, tufa, and general sculpture.

Like a lot of stuff, it was a good idea that didn't fly.

Sue

i think the Oddjob was designed originally for mixing crete for fence posts.
The seal has a very short life if not cleaned everytime the thing is opened.
It's well named, not designed for regular use.

I have an Odjob and I originally found it more trouble than it was worth. I recently fell back and re-grouped as I didn't appreciate being outsmarted by the thing, and figured out that if I make up the tufa mixture dry and then put it in the Odjob that it works just fine. If I dump the ingregients in it separately, then the ingredients just don't mix and there are lots of blue words flying around the workshop. I make sure not to overload it with water (for all the obvious downfalls of that), preferring to have my tufa a little on the dry side and then dump it into a mortar trough and finish it up by hand which is pretty easy as it is almost done anyway. I find that I get a better consistent quality from batch to batch using it this way. I can make up a batch in under 5 minutes. Like any of the tools, it does have to be rinsed off well after each use. For large batches, I use my regular cement mixer which isn't exactly a day at the beach either...try keeping that thing clean in the winter!!

I recently completed a fence with an Odjob I picked up second hand. I found it to work well for 50lb bags of premixed fence concrete. I will say that the lid is hard to get on and off, and if it's too loose it will leak a bit, and too tight and you'll never get it off again. I ended up making a larger handle out of two scraps and a 2x4 to put the lid on/off and it works great (more leverage). I get more consistent mixes than I ever have in a bucket/mixing tub, and this was important b/c I was adding accelerator to the mix. If it's leaking, maybe use it on a lawn, or tighten the lid. I also found that I flipped it over a couple of times before rolling back and forth to get a good mix.