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Making Charcoal

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awemawson:
VTSteam, how are you compressing your brickettes?

I can see it being imensely boring doing the odd ton or two by hand :bugeye:

vtsteam:
I am compressing charcoal by hand for experimentation purposes. The odd ten pound melt won't require a ton.  I doubt I will use ten pounds of charcoal to melt ten pounds of iron. If I was doing it by the ton I wouldn't use a 55 gallon barrel to make charcoal, either.

ps. if this did work out okay, I'd consider making a mechanized press. That might be a fun project in itself.

Ashlyn Katarzyna:
I tried the above with wheat flour and used 91% rubbing alcohol as the wetting agent.  I didn't let it dry but it lit instantly and burned for a while on its own, it didnt crumble when i picked it up either, I concur that probably will last a while.  I was just curious if there were other wetting agents that would be better doesn't seem like stuff that contains water is the ideal thing. I know in pyrotechniques most guys use denatured alcohol to form up a charge since it doesn't contaminate star burst and lift charge compositions. 

I've been looking for a way to load up my furnace on good charcoal. Store bought sucks I can burn them up in about 15 minutes on high and the slag left behind is less than desirable.  I got all of this free lumber from the desert this afternoon, it took a few trips in the Ranger to get all of it that wasnt eaten by termites, people take it upon themselves to dump stuff in our desert unfortunately they've been doing it for awhile and that is one reason why we are losing the ability to use it.


 Everything I have gotten has been from the desert. This score of fuel should last me a few years, or if we do it by furnace re-lining quite a few.

oldgoaly:
there is a fairly cheap version of coke called petroleum coke but it is too fine for most things, so I will try you suggestions on a bonding agent, I've already got the carbo-coke.

vtsteam:
Chad, sorry I hadn't seen your earlier message for some reason. I wasn't successful at melting iron in my sawed off cupola furnace with charcoal (not compressed). Even after adding an extension. Charcoal works well for melting aluminum.

oldgoaly, since Ironman has suggested coke itself as a binder I wonder if your petroleum coke could work that way with charcoal, or with itself? The catch is that in general to fuse coke you need high temps and lots of heat, which kind of defeats the purpose of a fuel, particularly a purchased one! Can it be compressed at low temperature?

But maybe if you used the flour as a low temp adhesive, and coke as a high temp adhesive for charcoal, or for itself, briquets could be made that stayed bound through the burning process.

Where do you get "petroleum coke"? Are you in UK, US or elsewhere?

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