# Charcoal Making Anecdotes **URL:** http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/charcoal-making-anecdotes/2364 **Category:** Charcoal Gasification **Created:** [March 13, 2016, 11:29am UTC](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/charcoal-making-anecdotes/2364 "2016-03-13T11:29:27Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 51
### Author: ![bsoutherland](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v2/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bsoutherland](http://forum.driveonwood.com/u/bsoutherland) #### Post date: [July 1, 2018, 3:02am UTC](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/charcoal-making-anecdotes/2364/51 "2018-07-01T03:02:40Z")
I normally put charcoal fines in the garden as biochar. In Rwanda our charcoal is all fines from crop waste. With these fines, we make large cooking briquettes 4" round X 3" high. Now I need to make some tiny briquettes to run a gasifier in Rwanda. Today I tried using a sausage stuffer to extrude small diameter charcoal–no go. Then I tried a heavy duty meat grinder with sausage stuffer attachment. Still poor results–the charcoal has to be too wet to extrude. Only makes soft irregular sized “briquettes.” I finally went extremely low tech with a 1/2" rod and a 1/2" pipe. ![IMG_20180630_105616827](http://forum.driveonwood.com/uploads/default/original/3X/5/d/5dcb54c5c84017b603faf132e0349b3ac2df1195.jpg) I used the pipe like a cookie cutter. Pushed down into a 1" thick pile of moist charcoal with 5% binder. Place over nylon window screen (lets water squeeze out easier) on a board and bang the rod in the pipe up and down a few times. Then push out the pellet. Voila, carbonite. Labor intensive, but labor is cheaper than importing gasoline to a remote village in a landlocked country. Now to make enough for a gasifier test run. --- _[View the full topic](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/charcoal-making-anecdotes/2364)._