How To Make Your Own Charcoal

hey guys my name is Rick welcome back to the channel in this video I wanted to share with you how I made lump charcoal out of red oak for my grilling and in my Forge so let's get started you know the first step was I needed to make a kiln to cook the charcoal and it's a process called pyrolysis and one of the parts I needed was some some pipe and I noticed back in the backyard I had this old basketball backboard and and they had a nice three pipe in the back so sorry kids dad's on a mission I need that plate [Music] at Harbor Freight portable bandsaw about 99 bucks in Harbor Freight and I use it all the time really works great it's that big pipe I'm taking and I'm off to the shop so between that pipe in this 55-gallon drum I picked up that's all I needed to build this kiln the first part here is I'm just drilling an initial hole and then with my jigsaw here I'm going to cut out some cut the tabs that will act like you know a flange to hold that that a little over 3 inch pipe I'm cutting the pipe here again with that Harbor Freight bandsaw of Awesomeness this pipe was about eight inch thick nice and rigid that's what I wanted I cut about a three-foot section and stuffed mmm I don't know maybe six inches down into the drum and here now I'm just folding back those tabs back to the to hold that pipe in nice and hard and then I decided to weld them about those tabs to the pipe I didn't want any anyone take any risk I don't want that pipe falling off as I'm you know cooking the charcoal so that came out pretty well and I also had some of this flame retardant fabric that I wanted to use at the base of that smokestack to you know prevent any air leakage because you're trying to do this in a in an oxygen-free environment to cook that wood so that turned out pretty well and then we have I'm welding here a piece of threaded threaded rod 3/8 inch doesn't have to be 3/8 Braga's put a threaded rod there trying to weld that on to the top of the smokestack to help build build this cover goes through the process you're gonna want something to close off that smokestack or adjust it half full full throttle eventually at the end you'll want to cover it all up and snuff out any anything inside the drum so here we are outside and this is my fire pit that I have and a couple cinder blocks and some leaf springs to hold up the drum I thought that would be a perfect place to do all this worked out pretty well and the first process I used was to where the first step really was to burn off all the paint inside that drum and whatever else that was in there any leftover remnants I didn't want that contaminating my charcoal so I just stuffed it with some sticks and whatnot and after a while I think it to flame went out and we were good to go all the paint burned off unfortunately though that that fabric melted or burned off you must have not been flame retardant so I ended up switching that out changing it putting in some some kale wool I used Kol to wrap around that base and then I wrapped it wrap the Calla wall with some aluminum tape and that turned out really well so here we are with the red oak just packing that the drum full trying to pack it as tight as I can and I tried to use pieces of red oak that was about the same size [Music] not too small you know they say nothing over four inches I've seen I've read but you know I didn't go with that I had some of these you're about six inches in below long so there we are we're all packed in we got wood packed inside as well as out just putting the rim on sure that was nice and tight again we don't want air leaking in tricky that that ring we got to put on and this was about mid-afternoon and I decided I was not gonna start this until at dusk do it at night given the level of smoke that comes off so this is about 7 o'clock at night just before dusk here's a little booyah to get started get the flame going it really was a it was a really nice setup because it was really providing some even heat across that whole barrel now the first stage was lasted for about an hour and that was to burn off all the moisture that was in the wood inside the barrel and so you can tell that by that those big all that white smoke that was all of water vapor coming off you can see at the top of the smokestack that was got pretty pretty thick and heavy and then eventually it died down and we then transitioned into the second stage which was to burn off all the methane and the hydrogen which took about two hours and and that was that was kind of fun and pretty interesting like my daughter stopped out and took some slow-mo here's a slow-mo video of of the flames coming off that smokestack we thought this was really cool almost mesmerizing now a lot of designs I've looked at they piped this they piped this down underneath the barrel and they used that to heat the drum once they get to this stage and they don't need to add any more wood I was gonna do that it would make it much more efficient but I had the wood and I didn't want I wanted to keep this as simple as possible so I might end up doing that later but for now I'm not gonna do it this was cool though so thanks to my sweet daughter so now at this stage is two hours afterwards you very little is coming out of the smokestack at this point the paralysis is complete and we're pretty much left with charcoal on the inside so we buttoned it up and went to bed here's the next day and I didn't know what to expect I didn't know what was going to be inside it was either all burnt out nothing left or or maybe it didn't burn anything it didn't transform it enough into charcoal so that was a bit anxious to see what was inside but I was pretty amazed that when I opened up the I was pretty amazed to see what what was inside it was it was terrific it was about 40 pounds and ended up being about 40 pounds of charcoal and I didn't have any that didn't charcoal and it was all just terrific stuff Wow so success I claim victory for this and and it wasn't that that hard not that time-consuming and I ended up storing this all into a plastic plastic garbage bags black garbage bags non-scented so that's it guys listen thanks for watching hope this was informative and if you want to help out the channel please don't forget to Like comment share share this video that would be great so thanks guys and we'll be back again here soon take care

Channel: Rick Rabjohn

Views: 565,775

Rating: 4.8869314 out of 5

Keywords: how to make charcoal, making charcoal, charcoal retort, charcoal kiln, Make charcoal, charcoal DIY, biochar

Id: hpUPAGGrzuA

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 02 2018