[TheForge] forging questions

[jerry Frost]

Mike: We had a sack of feed grain go bad on us and I gave it a lash for the
heck of it. I'm a gas forge guy though I have a number of coal forges and
have used charcoal more than any other solid fuel. So it was dried feed
corn, not cobs. It burned surprisingly like coal but when I thought about
all the oil and sugar in corn it's maybe not so surprising. It made a fine
forge fuel though I have this THING about burning food for fuel.

It's not so time consuming to make charcoal in a retort though you DO have
to pay attention to prevent it from just burning to ash. I helped a guy a
few years ago who was cooking with charcoal. He bought an overpack drum,
these are designed to contain leaking 55gl. drums so they have clamp on lids
and are somewhere around 70gl. I'd know for sure but I'm not searching it
out. Anyway, I made him some steel cross bars to keep a 55gl. drum off the
bottom with it laid on it's side.

We packed the clap lid 55gl. drum with dry wood and closed it up. We
replaced the gasket on both drums with stove rope. We put a street 90 in the
bung in the lid of the 55gl drum pointing to the edge and laid it at the
bottom. I'd made him a little stove door for the lid of the overpack drum
and we just bought a stove pipe jack and installed it at the far end. 

So the unit was an over pack drum with a fire door at the bottom front and a
stove pipe at the top rear. Inside resting a couple inches off the bottom of
the overpack drum was a 55gl drum with a pipe fitting aimed straight
downward in front of the fire door.

We stuffed the space between the two with brush and sticks then lit it off
at the fire door and let it rip. In pretty short order, well before the
brush and sticks burned out the wood began pyrolizing first giving off water
vapor, then alcohols, ketones, acetones and various "tones" when it the
flame from the pipe fitting stopped showing a flame we reached in with a
poker and stuffed fiberglass cloth in the street 90 to prevent air getting
in. Shut the fire door and stuffed the smoke stack with fiberglass to
prevent any fresh air getting in.

It worked really well the return was maybe 65-70% in volume, weight of
course was maybe 10% if that. Roy seemed happy and that was the only time I
ever participated in a burn with him. We sat around watching in the fire
door, drinking home brew beer and telling lies. Not a bad way to spend a
summer evening though I wish we'd thought of bringing something to cook in
the fire.

Oh, that'd be a not so brief rundown of the "indirect" method.

Frosty

-----Original Message-----
From: TheForge [mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Mike
Spencer
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2015 12:08 PM
To: theforge at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [TheForge] Re: forging questions


> I like the idea of using corn.  Our open forge meet is held as the 
> shop of a corn farmer!  I might just rake his yard -- there's always 
> spillage -- and give it a try!


Are you talking here about cobs after the dried kernels have been shelled
off?  Or are you talking about whole ears of corn or shelled kernels?

I assumed the OP meant cobs, byproduct of the feed corn process.

I have access to quite a lot of poplar that shoud be felled.  But a process
for converting it to charcoal that isn't time consuming and bothersome (or
else very expensive in gear) is a problem.

One of the demonstrators at the '84 ABANA conference (who forged copper, not
doable in coal due to embedding of cinder) made his own charcoal in a large
stainless tank refurbished to recirculate and burn the wood tar as it was
driven off.  Sounded like a moderately complicated thing to make.  Any air
leak would potentially lead to a runaway fire in a ca. 100 gallon kiln
space.

- Mike

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