Making charcoal for blacksmithing

after burning up a bunch of charcoal the other day making that skillet i thought it would be a good opportunity to actually talk about making charcoal now right up front i should mention that i don't make a lot of charcoal because it is very time consuming and the yield for the way that i have been doing it isn't all that great so it's not a real efficient use of my time to make charcoal the way that i do but it's still kind of fun it uses up some wood that would otherwise go to waste and hopefully one of these days i'll come up with a better system the outer barrel has some vent holes drilled at the bottom and a little window so you can take a peek in there and see what the fire conditions are between the two barrels it then has a layer of sand in the bottom that is used to block the vents on the inner barrel but during the main burn the inner barrel has to get air so it's supported by some removable steel bars that will take out at the end of the burn the much smaller inner barrel has holes perforated in the bottom of it and that's what will be sealed up by that sand and is supported by the bars on the inside so air can get to these holes this system of charcoal manufacturers not my invention by any means i was first introduced to this on a youtube video by stark raven studios and i will link to that video up here so you can watch my original inspiration at this point it's just a matter of loading that inner barrel with the materials that you're going to use to make charcoal just about any wood will work although i would avoid painted woods or pressure treated lumber because you have no idea what those things might off gas when you're actually burning the charcoal later but the more consistent you are in any given individual burn the better your results would be what i mean by that is if you have a mixture of hardwoods and soft woods burn just the soft woods in one burn burn just the hard woods at another burn if you mix the pine and the oak pine will all burn up before you have completely converted the oak into charcoal and then you're just wasting the pine but if you burn them separately you can get a good batch of pine charcoal and a good batch of oak charcoal and both are useful and i'm not implying that pine and oak are the only things you can use those are just the more common things that i have around here for me i trim wood just right here on the property we have to do a lot of fire mitigation work so we have a lot of small branches and things like that and anything in the inch and a half diameter to two maybe even three inches makes good charcoal although as it gets up more to three inches i tend to save that for firewood but you can make charcoal out of cord wood you can make it out of the cut branches or saplings you can even use construction waste it's all usable material for making charcoal now you can probably make charcoal out of old pallets if you want to but the wood is kind of thin and it's not going to make the biggest longest lasting charcoal and if you leave the nails in those are built-in clinkers that are going to mess with your fire so it's better to either pull the nails or discard those sections of wood that have nails but it is wood and it would work if the materials you have are long and straight you can put those long pieces in there and then break them up after they turn a charcoal you just break them by hand at that point you don't have to use a saw if they're really bent and twisted pieces of wood it's probably better to cut them into shorter lengths to start with just to make it easier to pack as much material as you possibly can into that inner barrel [Music] now the goal is to get as much of that into this inner barrel as possible so try to do a neat job be a little bit methodical fill in all the gaps even if you fill it with smaller stuff that's going to burn up it'll help fuel the process [Music] and finally you want to build a little campfire on the top of the whole thing and this is how we'll get it going as this burns this actually draws the air downward through the inner barrel and then the giraffe comes up between the barrels and eventually there'll be a lid on this but this has to burn down to level with the outer barrel before we can put the lid on now because we live in a wildfire area where we are i can't do this if the conditions are hot and dry last year starting in april we were under an outdoor fire ban all the way into october sometime so there was really never a good chance to burn charcoal unless i thought about it in the winter and i didn't think about it then so this isn't something i can do all the time it's also something i can't leave unattended so i'm going to find some outdoor chores to do right around here while this burns well it's been about 30 minutes and the level of this is down far enough that i can put the lid on the barrel i've got a hole cut in it and that lines up with a stove pipe now this lid's got some open holes in it it actually had plastic plugs in it when i got it so they've long since melted out i just stick a couple of bricks over the top of those and at this point we're probably looking at two to three hours it just depends on what species of wood you've got in there hardwood versus soft wood how dry it is how well packed you have the barrel all of those things play into it so you got to watch it and i'll show you what to look for when we get to that point now when you first close this up if you look through the little window at the bottom of the big barrel you can't see any glow in the holes through the small barrel so there's no fire down there it's all up top it has to work its way down after a couple hours i can see some glow in those holes it started smoking more probably because the wood on the bottom is a little bit greener and it just has more volatiles to cook off but with that glow there i'm close to being finished and when this smoke clears up completely i think that's a good sign that i'm done i haven't done this in quite a while so i might be a little off on my memory but one way or the other i think we're really close to the time to shut off all the air to this and we'll show you what that looks like as soon as we get to that point now at this stage you're going to need some good gloves or maybe a pair of tongs especially designed to take all these lids off and deal with all this stuff but i find the gloves are enough as long as you don't hold on to that barrel for too long so the first thing we need to do is pull all of those supports out of the bottom then we're going to take the chimney and the lid off and we're going to wiggle that inner barrel down into the sand bed and make sure that it is good and sealed up on the bottom so there's no air coming up through there this gets too much air you're just going to burn up all your charcoal now this is cooked down quite a bit but that's not a bad batch of charcoal it looks like put a lid on the inside then i put the outer lid back over here just to seal it up as well as i can now certainly the more airtight you can make this the better off you are this is not a perfectly airtight system i don't have an original lid for that inner barrel if i did that would be a big improvement on the project but this does seem to work i don't lose too much volume at this point i hope you can see me the smoke's blowing right into the camera but it's not blowing in my face so i'm okay with that now this has to sit until that is completely cool or when you give it air it's going to start burning your charcoal again so it's got to be completely cooled off overnight is ideal but this only took about oh three hours total this morning between cutting wood doing the burn and getting to this point so probably before dinner time tonight i'll be able to open this up and we'll see what we ended up with it's late afternoon about six hours later let's see what we ended up with that looks pretty good to me now this still feels a little bit hot it's hard to tell if that's just residual heat or if it's still burning a little bit in there overnight is usually better so i'm going to get this sorted through and into another barrel with an airtight lid and that way it guarantees that it's not going to keep burning and by sorting i mean getting rid of all the ash and any other junk that might be in there and to do that i've got this piece of expanded mesh set up so i can dump this barrel on here and then push it into this 55 gallon drum and it has a nice airtight lid to go on it so it'll be just fine for storing this for that matter you could just take this and dump it in the drum burn another barrel dump it in the drum keep it sealed and once it's cold then you could go through and sift out all the ash but i think that's a little harder work even though you'll get more charcoal done for a given amount of time just depends on what you prefer to do and some of this is not completely done this piece is charred on the outside but the inside is not so that is not going to be something i keep as charcoal but i'll put it in the barrel for the next one same thing will be true with this so the bigger stuff didn't char very well but the smaller stuff is fine now this ends up with a lot of really small stuff that will not be good forged fuel but i'll go ahead and keep it anyways because it will help to some extent it just blows out of the fire pot really easily personally i prefer stuff about this size that stays in the fire pot is really a pretty good fuel so that's really a quick look at making charcoal there are lots of other ways to do this this double barrel method is just a nice simple introduction to charcoal making if i get really serious about it and i want to make enough charcoal to burn all year long i'm going to need a much bigger system and maybe at some point i'll talk about that but i think that can be a different video because right now it would all be theoretical i don't actually have a firm plan on what i want to do for a bigger charcoal setup thanks for stopping by hope you have time in your day to get out to your shop make something but stay safe wear your safety glasses we'll see you for the next video

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 53,161

Rating: 4.9787164 out of 5

Keywords: Blacksmith, blacksmithing for beginners, black bear forge, john switzer, Blacksmithing, Blacksmithing project, how to blacksmith, blacksamith shop, blacksmith forge, learn blacksmithing, charcoal, making charcoal, burning charcoal, charcoal retort, charcoal kiln, forge charcoal, charcoal forge, charcoal for blacksmithing, blacksmithing chacoal, double barrel charcoal kiln, forge fuel, make your own charcoal, how to make charcoal, how to, diy charcoal, lump charcoal

Id: 5MAyLNfTX8U

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021