Making charcoal.

[Mooseherder]

We swung by Henry Fords mill with Jeff on the atv trip to the U.P.  I don't remember if this was for making charcoal.



 

[mike_belben]

Briliant.

[Don P]

Made me curious for more details;
Kingsford (charcoal) - Wikipedia

[Al_Smith]

If you ever get a chance make a stop at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn Mich. Plan to spend the day because it takes that long .How could any one person ever accumulate that much wealth ? While you are there look  because my name is on at least  four  engines that were the last ever produced .One is a Ford 460 V8 .

[Ron Scott]

Built Ford tough in General Board (forestryforum.com)

[Beau Woodworks]

Anyone make their own charcoal? I'm thinking about building a retort to cook some hardwood scraps from the firewood processor. I have a lot of dry pine slabs to get rid of, and I think it would be cool to make use of them for something useful.

Yes, we make charcoal as a sideline. Made up a small batch retort which has proved excellent. Retorts are so efficient you may find you do not need much of your pine to convert the hardwoods into charcoal. 

[Don P]

You know that's gonna take a picture  ;D

[Beau Woodworks]

You know that's gonna take a picture  ;D

Did try but yet to work on how to download a picture onto here. Maybe too new to be allowed? 

[Don P]

Here's a link to a video tutorial on posting photos here;
Updated Photo Posting Tutorial in Technical Support Topics (forestryforum.com)

It takes a few minutes the first time but it is second nature now. The plus side is the forum has just about every photo going back to the beginning. It has proven to be well worth the effort. When you look back to an old topic about making or fixing something, all the pictures are still there. That is so rare and so often frustrating when I think I've found info while searching the web, the text is there and the pics are gone.

If you're doing it as a sideline, I'd like to see the support setup for the operation if you don't mind... just how are you handling, sifting sorting, and bagging the mess.

[Beau Woodworks]

 

 

 Thanks for the link. 

One of the retort and one of my very simple grading set up. I have lots more pictures but they are still on another computer that won't speak to the internet without crashing haha

[Don P]

All I've done so far is sifting through screens. I've seen tilted screen cylinders for cleaning root crops that would make quick work of that. It could continue to a section with very coarse screen so the really big stuff goes out the end to be crushed or reburned.

Is the retort an indirect fire under a sealed but vented box of wood sitting on top of the firebox or is everything ablaze in a single container and then snuffed, or ??? ? I guess describe a setup and burn. What I've done so far is better than a bonfire but caveman crude.

[Beau Woodworks]

All I've done so far is sifting through screens. I've seen tilted screen cylinders for cleaning root crops that would make quick work of that. It could continue to a section with very coarse screen so the really big stuff goes out the end to be crushed or reburned.

Is the retort an indirect fire under a sealed but vented box of wood sitting on top of the firebox or is everything ablaze in a single container and then snuffed, or ??? ? I guess describe a setup and burn. What I've done so far is better than a bonfire but caveman crude.

It's a retort so the fire and the charge are separated. I have a barrel set up on a frame inside there. I use waste wood to burn under the frame and the barrel gets slowly cooked. It has a unique way of diverting the gases from the charcoal into the fire which I can't divulge at this stage . I run the firebox at 450c-500C that's 843F-932F I think. 
I load one large garden trug of dry waste wood into the firebox. Load in the barrel and the gas system and close it up. It now has an automated air control unlike in the picture so you light it and walk away. It takes 4 -5 hours to convert the wood. When done you take out the barrel and reload with about half a trug of fuel and another barrel of wood. For the charcoal, I use smaller diameter wood that is less desirable with our log customers and would have been wasted before and get 100% conversion rate. Got a great little machine for chopping it all up like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVK0OMGILyE&t=32s&ab_channel=REMETCNCTECHNOLOGY
The grader is basic but works well as it's good not to over agitate the charcoal as this will break it up more. I just shake the charcoal down into a builders bucket with a line drawn on it at the right amount. Then pour the measured bucket into the bags. I only do it as a hobby so the extra time spend screening the charcoal by hand doesn't really matter to me and it's cheap!
Hope that all makes sense

[mike_belben]

Nice.  What happens with the fines?

[Don P]

Mike, do some googling on biochar and soil building.  Terra preta (spelling?) is the amazonian soil type they are usually talking about/trying to create but it is common to have high charcoal content in soils in places worldwide, the black earth of the prairies is generations of grass fired charcoal. From the little bit I've played with I have noticed charcoal fines are light and mobile, heading for the creek. If that becomes common practice we need a better understanding of downstream effects of that. If nothing else it does help soil tilth.

[Beau Woodworks]

Nice.  What happens with the fines?

We live on a farm so just chuck them in with the compost. I have experimented with it on the veg beds but cant honestly say I noticed the difference but it wasn't very scientifically done and wasn't 'charged' first. Some charcoal makers successfully sell it as biochar. I do have one lad who takes a bit to use in his forge.

A bit of info on Biochar here UK Biochar Research Centre | Welcome to the UKBRC

[mike_belben]

Thats where i was going with that.  I have researched it and played around with it in 2017/18 and basically decided it was bunk.  A bunch of people needing money with something from nothing to sell so they make up a wizzbang fertility story and pray to the climate gods.  


In terms of adding nutrient to the soil i still call BS... however i have changed my stance on being useless.  The charred pieces have tremendous surface area in the cracks and seams yet hold together like the aggregates in really really good living soil. This creates lots of porosity for oxygen holding and water infiltration. It creates spaces for critical arthropods like ants and centipedes.. And most importantly, spaces for micorhizal fungi.  


That is its best feature and it would show results much much faster if the char was first innoculated in fungi.  Leave the char fines in a pile in shady wet woods covered in forest litter, punky decayed wood with white fuzz etc.  Hose it down with some type of sugar water to jump start the percolating and feeding of the fungi down into the char bits.


Adding it below grade to ones best garden bed could be going backwards for a while, because that is disturbing old fungi to install young fungi.  In that case id scratch up the top, spread some char then mulch over that thick to keep sun from drying it.  Fungi must stay moist.  

Really dead crusty dusty clodding hard crop tillage dirt has no fungi to left to disturb so in that application id turn it in.  You can only make dead dirt better.  

Next year i intend to compare char to stump grindings which is my present favorite material.  I have a supply of "ramial" only branch chips being delivered now too for comparison. 

[jake pogg]

I make charcoal on a fairly regular basis,for forging fuel.

I think my method would fall under Don's definition of "caveman" kind,a reclosable 55-gal drum that gets loaded with wood split to under 2"/about 1' long(very much like cookstove wood),fired with restricted exhaust,and eventually snuffed with a lid.

I've gotten used to referring to this as an"open-retort" method but may well be technically incorrect.

I try to implement elements of the Japanese method(-s),though have never bothered to try to copy their style of a rig.

A part of the Japanese idea is to try to leave about 15-20% volitiles in the resulting charcoal,as they do contribute a slight amount of BtU's,and are also said to modify the burn in other ways.

The only species available to me is White spruce so the resulting charcoal is on a softer side,and of course is nowhere as rich in calories as most hardwoods.

However,the softwood charcoal gives off it's calories at much faster rate,which makes it better for forge-welding vs a longer burn desirable for more of an extended forging operations.

One of the most important factors in welding is to create and maintain a reducing atmosphere zone in your fire-pot,and that's where the remnant volitiles come in handy,combining with less oxygen and faster they "temper" the fire(making it dirtier and richer in C).

Wood pyrolysis is a surprisingly complex,difficult to control process(even with most sophisticated equipment).
Some rules of thumb that i follow,or try to,the factors to shoot for are:

Resulting charcoal must fracture cleanly across the grain,as a sign of it being "done".
It is desirable for the fracture to be glossy,a sign of it not being over-done.
And lastly a truly caveman factor that of a lump of charcoal not marking your skin when drawn across the back of your hand(which i think is a simple density indicator),also as a sign that the product has not been over-cooked.

Whenever i travel to town(i live remotely and hundreds of miles from the nearest road),i enviously examine friend's stashes of beautiful,store-bought hardwood charcoal,oak,mesquite,fruitwoods,et c.,that they use for outdoor grilling.

However,this poor soft stuff that i come up with is surprisingly efficient:A forging of a couple+ pounds comes to heat very rapidly,making it eminently practical to work up and axe-head size tool of any complexity of construction;the nature of this fuel in no way a limiting factor in the process.

I use a hand-crank blower for air-blast,and a very modest firepot.Originally owned by an Amish family in Kansas(they upgraded:)),it was cast sometime in the 1860-ies for use with bituminous coal.Again,surprisingly,it works just fine with this softwood charcoal,though in welding it needs filling every heat.

As to the question of why any particular species would produce it's own flavor in cooking,possibly it may have to do with that % of remnant volitile compounds...But i really wouldn't know the science behind that. 

[Machinebuilder]

I gave the charcoal making another try on Saturday.

I use an old drum that was laying around, filled it with variuos pieces of scrap and the top didn't fit well because the drum was a bit out of round.
I put a concrete block on top and a big chunk of wood, Piles more scraps around it and fired it up.

 



 


 

 

I ended up with about 1/2 barrel of charcoal and learned that the big chunk is too big.

I also found the barrel is not too good, when I emptied it I saw some holes in the bottom.

I'm happy with the outcome and will try it out when I smoke my turkey.

[Beau Woodworks]

Nice. 

The holes in the bottom of the barrel are not necessarily a bad thing. They will release volatile gases into the fire and aid the cooking of the charcoal far more so than the gases that escape from the lid

[SwampDonkey]

Up north its a desired firewood.  In tennesse hickory is often shunned as a firewood for a reputation of melting stoves and burning too hot.  

Rest easy Mike, we've warped many a stove with beech and rock maple. Not me personally, but I've seen a few over the years. Some of those Enterprise stoves, which were in every farm house in these parts, have been warped. That was more apparent with their wood furnaces. The old foundry closed up when she burnt to the ground. ;D

I'm intrigued by the process of making charcoal, but personally, that is as far as it gets. I love the heat of wood, but I don't have much for rock maple or yellow birch to get involved. Oak is too sparse and hickory is extinct up here. ;)