Making Willow Charcoal for Black Powder - The BEST Charcoal! ElementalMaker

hey what's going on guys welcome back to the elemental maker today we are gonna be skinning the limbs of a fallen foe and then cremating him him being the willow tree that took over my in-laws backyard recently cut it down they were kind enough to give me a bunch of the limbs probably would have been better to get the bigger chunks but those were already vouched for so I got these we're gonna be making charcoal no this being will oh well it was one of the best charcoals out there for making black powder for pyrotechnics so gonna basically peel the bark off these of the skin basically it's it's pretty thin stuff because these are little branches cut them down into sizable pieces that will fit in my retort and then throw them in a fire we got charcoal now this stuff is actually pretty easy to get the bark off give it a little cut because painting is getting under it it tends to peel off pretty easy and once you got it started it goes pretty quick probably not going to do this whole batch but but there is plenty here for quite a bit of black powder and the other cool thing now I'm not sure how well this is gonna work because it's the thin bark and I've only seen it done with the actual tree bark but willow is actually what aspirin was originally derived from well sell cyclic acid there's a compound in here that when it's oxidized in your stomach what is it first hydrolyzed and then oxidized than your stomach turns into cell cyclic acid which is a mild painkiller so this is what was used for probably thousands of years and my hope is that in another video I'll be able to extract some salicylic acid from it and potentially made it with the acetyl group to actually make aspirin so acetyl salicylic acid salicylic acid there we go one done now I'm just gonna rinse and repeat quite a few more so now that I've debarked a bunch of the willow and removed the knots as best as possible kind of cut those out because the knots are denser wood so it's it's going to kind of create embers in your black powder if that's what you use it for but I'm going to cut these to size to put a paint can this guy's a reference I should be using the bandsaw but that is currently covered behind three ATVs not getting to that at this moment so at this point we probably cut enough to pack up the paint can which from this point I guess I'll refer to it as a retort we're going to poke a hole in that and that hole is actually going to sit down on the facing downward onto the actual fire that I'm gonna build to get things started at a certain point once once enough gases are created from the volatiles escaping from the charcoal process or pyrolysis process it'll actually start feeding itself so the the volatile x' will actually start combusting and it'll kind of be a chain reaction there so in the bottom of the paint can right about center I'm just gonna make a hole expand that a hair you don't want to make your whole tube baked cos when uh when the pile pyrolysis actually stops and then cool things cool down air is gonna rush back in there through the hole and that'll probably ignite some of your charcoal so the less exposure to air the better so I'm just gonna take this down and that's about perfect I don't let all the gases vent and shouldn't allow too much air so it kind of circulate through there to cause it to combust too much one important thing you do want to keep mindful of when you make that hole obviously you're gonna treat be creating metal chips which you do not want either charcoal because you know if you've got little particles of steel in your charcoal when you put it in your ball mill if you're making black powder you have the chance of sparks so well I'm actually gonna use a microfiber just to make sure there's nothing essentially left in there you got that pretty please make sure this is nice and clean I'd have to cut a little bit more they look like I'm gonna have quite enough to fully fulfill it and the fact that this is currently willow makes it a little more challenging because it does not stack nicely yeah I'm gonna have to cut a couple more pieces want to make it a reasonably full run otherwise it's just a waste so move around my parents borrow in their fireplace since I do not have one through a little kerosene on there you're in fracking country your your water comes with kerosene built in it's pretty awesome good things and we are off soon that'll be making beautiful charcoal via pyrolysis it is a hot freakin day for this got enough swamp ash for Louisiana to claim me as a territory so the process of making charcoal you're actually taking the organic matter which is wood in this case and we're removing the water from it so we're be hydrating it and we're also hopefully driving off as many volatile x' as we can what gas is actually a pretty useful industrial byproducts but in most applications that just get spun off as we're doing here although you can actually purify it and run stuff off of it I think I think Nighthawk is light may have done a video using it actually so the fires going pretty good now I just restocked it with some pallet wood there that I left everything even now sticking out of it but I was trying to TP it around the can as best as possible to help keep those flames really flicked in the can I can hear the gas escaping from the bottom of the tork already and really see it burning off down there pretty well it's starting to sound like a 747 pick it off and see down there that's the gas it's all burning off I'm sure there's a lot of water vapor in there too a lot of heat the nice thing about having it Stoke itself is the smoke is greatly reduced this process typically generates a lot of smoke and having these gases burnt off like that helps keep the smoke down dramatically open that vent hole I made it was big enough it sounds like pressures building in there pretty good just last minute or so the jet seemed to slow down which means I believe we have all the water driven off at this point and it's just a nice steady stream coming out of the vent hole which is indicating that at this point it's just the volatile is being driven off or woods probably fully dehydrated at this point so we got the report out of the fire and have given it a pretty good amount of time to cool off probably an hour and a half you don't want to open it too early because if the wood is still above its ignition point you let fresh oxygen in got yourself a little charcoal barbecue going off you'll see the 10 after just one firing is already hurting pretty good beautiful got some nice charcoal in there look at that beautiful charcoal you can see how much the the volume decreased it's pretty incredible lost a lot of mass there and quite a bit of volume but that is the end goal beautiful charcoal I'm just gonna grab a nice plate to throw this on and we'll check it for any incomplete portions parts that didn't quite pyrolyze completely alright you got a pretty nice yield of charcoal out of that little paint can there close to a pound let's say probably you should probably mass it and actually get a real number about that it matters but just good to know so at this point I'm just gonna throw it into a couple zip locks and then smash it up into a nice charcoal powder and of course like the good old college days I'm gonna double bag it added protection one year on sure yeah few holes in the bag yeah that's reasonably powder it's definitely still some chumps in there oh yeah lots of big chunks in there left need stronger bags you think suck so just to screw around I'm gonna whip out a little probably not allowed to say it on YouTube anymore god forbid I'll just call it stump remover you certainly couldn't google it and find the ingredients a little bit of charcoal now this is not how how to actually make black powder what I'm missing the sulfur - I completely eyeball the ratios here in reality I throw this in my ball mill in the correct proportions few hours later you get a great black powder right out of it should probably throw a little sulfur in there just to make things right so I'm just gonna add a pinch of sulfur you can see them just totally eyeballing this is probably gonna be the crappiest black powder ever seen on YouTube but just to show our final product in the works all right let's see what she does all right so I couldn't find my usual burn plate I'm just gonna put it on some aluminum foil here a little bit I'm gonna move this away so that I don't have some big Chain Reaction now this isn't going to be very good black powder mortar and pestle really can't get down to a good molecular size especially compared to a ball mill that you run for a couple hours this it's probably going to produce a lot of embers and stuff but it might be a decent black powder well we'll see take a look yeah not too bad so as you guys could see that was actually pretty good black powder which surprised the hell out of me for just eyeballing the proportions there but you can see that willow is super effective when used as the well it is smoky as hell in here but willow is an extremely good one to use for black powder and as I said artists use it for Oh drawings all that sort of stuff but if you happen to have balsa willow there's another one called Paula weena I think it's pronounced probably butcher in that pretty art but those all make excellent woods for a very fast black-powder so this is kind of what you would use for lift pallor to to lift your shell into the air before it bursts and also you could use it as the burst charge the reason it's such a good wood for making charcoal for a black powder it's a very fast growing wood so it has a very porous nature it allows the potassium nitrate and sulfur to get into the poor structure and really kind of I guess intermix interdigitate really well there and that is what makes it such a good wood for it so I hope you guys enjoyed I finally got a patreon so if you want to keep the videos rolling and and if you enjoy them please consider donating there I'd really appreciate it and thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed have a good one [Music]

Channel: ElementalMaker

Views: 236,989

Keywords: Pyrotechnic, Charcoal, willow, pyro, aluminum powder, pyrolysis, diy

Id: IWuEFo55Ino

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 16 2018