[TheForge] Re: Test

[Mike Spencer]

Chuck> Any body out there.

Nah, we're all out in the yard watching the full moon rise.

BenB> a buddy brought over a small semi-portable forge with hand-crank
BenB> blower, but this time he put some Fir bark in there, and I was
BenB> impressed with the heat taken on small stock.

Okay, the moon is high on the sky now.

One guy here ran out of coal.  For a stop-gap, he's been starting a
good fire in his barrel stove, then stuffing if full of wood and
bunging it up tight for the night.  The next day he has some half-fast
(sp? Or is that half-baked? :-) charcoal.  Says it works pretty good
in the forge.

I have a bunch of poplar that I can't very well use for anything else
so I'm making (what I hope will be) a charcoal kiln out of a 200
gal. oil tank.  It's pretty far down on the priority list and I
wouldn't want to try it for the first time during such dry weather
lest it run away and spew sparks all over while I wasn't looking.  But
maybe before the snow flies I'll get to making the door and
recirculation pipe and try it.  Charcoal makes a lovely clean, hot
fire, only you go through a lot and it tends to shoot a lot of sparks
around the forge area.  But I hate to see those poplar logs just
rotting.

BenB> It also got me wondering about bees wax...

You have a supply of large quantities of free beeswax that would
otherwise go to landfill?  If you want to mess with a bunch of
industrial chemistry, there are people paying other criminals to dump
truckloads of used flammable solvents along back roads. They'd surely
be happy to fill your tank periodically.  Of course, then it would be
up to you to deal with any nickel, chromium, cadmium, mercury,
polycyclic aromatics, metal-organic compounds and the like. :-o

Just now I'm upgrading the cider press to use sealed external pillow
block bearings instead of the salvaged ship bearings I cobbled up last
fall for proof of concept.  They always got glommed with pomace and
sticky with dried juice.


- Mike

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