Addicted to harvesting

Good morning Wyatt.

Thanks for posting the video. No problem at all here with the video , the sound is fine :grinning:

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A quick description of my harvesting for people watching the video. The furnace with the live coals is a largish outdoor hot water wood furnace that heats my house. Generally at the first loading of the day I open the door, shove brands and unburnt wood to the back left and rake as many loose coals to the front as are easily available. I leave the door open to let the coals heat up and take the previous days pail of now cold coals over to the sifter. The sifter is a banner dustless rocker ash sifter meant to salvage coals or brands so they are not wasted. I put a finer screen on top of the factory coarse screen and it works well. Pour in half the contents of the pail, put the lid on the sifter, rock 5 or 6 times and pour the now fairly ashless char into my barrel. Repeat and then shovel new hot coals into the pail to be covered until the next day. I like the coals to sit near the open door of the furnace for a few minutes to get very active so I can flip back any that are burning with a yellow flame showing incomplete conversion. I was harvesting a full pail every day but now with the warm weather I am down to half that.

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Next time I am free I am going to pick up an old open top drum and cut it down so it fits like a cover on my fire pit wash machine drum.

I have thought about this a while.
After I am done with my fire for the sake of watching stuff burn I could stoke up the pit and smother it out with the drum.
It would not make charcoal, but I could cook a lot of the moister and impurities out of scrap.
I think they call this torrified wood.

Torrified fuel has some advantages like abnormally low moister content, it does not rot and insects do not like it,
If you made a simplified down draft gasifier for primarily burning charcoal it might also be able to handle a mixture of low grade charcoal and torrified wood without creating tar and moister.
Just a thought

Here is a wiki link that talks about Torrefaction.
Its claimed that you only lose about 10% of the energy stored in the fuel.
The down side to this is you are going to have left over pyrolysis products blowing out the sides of the drum
Since no one is around to observe the fire you can not safely light them and walk away ( fire haz )
Once these escape into the air you have odors that some people down wind find objectionable
Then there are the tars and condensate that will run down the inside of the drum.
These are not toxic waste but they are not good for the ground water and soil.

Ideally there should be a way to make a tar flare to burn these things, but then I come back to the issue of what to do about the fire I intended to smother out.
So the solution would seem to be some sort of collection system to capture the tar/wood vinegar and condensate.
Now I have a waste product to dispose of though since I have no use for this.

Oh ya the link

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Interesting series of videos where this guy experiments with improvised stone age techniques this one is a mud beehive style charcoal kiln.

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He also has one where he weaves/binds a shelter and forms a kiln to make his own clay roof tiles using stone tools and forest material

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I’ve seen these before and they’re worth watching more than once, great survival info. You just never can tell when you’ll need these skills and besides, it’s a lot of fun. Teach your children young.

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