[TheForge] Re: charcoal

[Mike Spencer]

> Most plans I've seen involve using a 55 gallon drum, with controllable
> air holes in it.

And 100 gal. fuel oil tanks should work, too.  But if you're going to
go into regular production, you probably want to scavenge for a
stainless tank.  The volatiles that you blow off are corrosive and
will eat oil drum or fuel tank.

The Swiss guy in Wisconsin (mea culpa, I can't remeber his name) who
demoed at the '84 ABANA conference described building a two-chamber
affair.  The upper chamber held the wood.  Smoke from the wood was
piped to the lower chamber where it was burned to heat the upper
chamber.  It sounded as if he was in regular production.  He used
charcoal for copper forging.  Grit from coke adheres to copper and and
pits the surface even if you don't forge it into the metal (as I
learned all on my own using Applied Stupidity.)

I wonder what the economics of charcoal production would be today.
The only business I knew of personally (in Leverett, Mass) shut down
20 or more years ago.  They had two brick charcoal kilns as big as
small houses, held several big truckloads of wood each.  I wonder if
you could tool up, presumably using something a bit more high-tech and
less expensive that huge brick bee hives, and still make a profit if
the supply of slab or scrap wood was essentially free.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^