Simplest Method For Producing Large Quantities of Charcoal

hi it's james here from sprinkle donut forge down in moscow texas and uh today jared here from veteran iron wood is going to teach me how to make charcoal so there you go hi it's me jared so i'm going to show you the absolute simplest way to make charcoal all you're going to need is 155 gallon drum with a hole punch about a half inch hole punched every four inches or so about an inch up from the bottom [Music] and then of course a locking lid it's going to be a flat which is currently housing our kindling and a ring now speaking of kindling you are going to need several different sizes of sticks you need your your really little kindling your pinky size kindling and then to keep the main part of your fire is going to be that stuff there which is about two fingers in thickness and the big pile the big stuff which is up to your wrist and thickness don't go any bigger than your wrist otherwise you're just going to have so much unburnt stuff in there it's not worth it but that stuff's going to charcoal up nice and that stuff's going to charcoal up nice i know that pile doesn't look all that big because while the fire is burning we're gonna be busting up that that stuff over there now short sweet version is you make a fire in this you just keep putting stuff on it until it gets to the top and you cap it but it's a lot more complicated that in reality so i will take you when we get to a finer point and point it out to you before i forget so you have ample time with which to make your charcoal you want a full 55 gallon barrel it's going to take around five five and a half hours depending on how big of sticks you throw in there okay we're gonna get this started now usually i just use grass but we're in the wet season now so i'm going to use some fat wood to get this lit i've got an old piece of half burnt material in here i got a bunch of fat wood propped up against that and my fine kindling here on top of that now the fat wood's going to stay lit a long time because it's full of pine tar we're just gonna let that burn our kindling our super fine kindling once that starts to get going i'll throw on a little bit bigger stuff now make sure you have all your stuff ready to go before you get to this point do you think you have enough wood triple it because once this gets going there's no stopping without starting completely over and it's going to go fast that's basically it let's uh yeah once this stuff catches i'm gonna have to throw more on here in the early stages it's pretty much just playing catch up with the fire making sure it's got enough food to eat okay i'm gonna get this going and when it comes time for the next part bring you back okay we've got our initial batch of uh finger-sized kindling going now we're going to start throwing on the medium-sized stuff okay we've been throwing the medium-sized stuff on it for a little while now we're at the first fine point all that kindling was just you know every which way it kind of tepeed in there now we're throwing in the bigger medium-sized stuff we want to throw in some this way and throw in some this way you know make us a couple little layers and we're going to stop okay you know we're gonna throw a little more on and we're gonna let it stop and once this turns black and then starts to turn ashy on the outside kind of silver then we will add our next layer and that's where the secret of this comes from is once that starts to ash on the outside it's starting to consume itself we want to add fresh fuel which is going to make that fire start burning what's above it instead of what's below it so basically we're building this fire at the bottom we're just going to build it up as we build it up with new stuff as it gets black and then silvery starting to turn ashy we're choking what's below it because it wants to burn the new stuff it doesn't want to burn the charcoal so we're basically just choking each previous layer okay we just threw on our first load of uh the large pile and now we're taking some of this medium pile and throwing that on top what that's gonna do is to help make that fire jump up because there's smaller stuff to burn and it's also going to help that big stuff start catching since there's heat below and heat above now we're quite low on our big pile so next i'll take you over here and show you how we process the big stuff now to process big big pieces you know up to wrist size you're gonna select a nice stout tree with a v in it what we're going to do is take our larger piece put it in the v about eight inches 200 millimeter break it now this is quite dry so it's breaking quite easy but once you get some properly seasoned pieces you're really going to be pulling and now we've done a couple we just scoop up the pile and throw it in the barrel okay i gotta make this quick because heat and camera no bad it's our black and not quite silvery yet we gotta wait a little bit before we add our next big uh big load of uh kind of wrist size stuff now i know some of you are going to ask about efficiency now doing an open pit like this and that's what this is called is an open pit uh but i think it was cody's lab if i'm not right about that it was some other channel i watched he did a comparison of an open pit versus a retort which is where you put wood inside of a container stick that inside a bigger container and then build a fire around that now to uh just to charcoal your wood now the weight difference that he got in an open pit where the fuel is providing the heat for charcoalizing or carbonization was negligible versus a retort he got the same results with a properly maintained open pit as he did with a charcoal retort now what that means for us is you can get more charcoal with less wood expended with an open pit because you don't need to build a secondary fire to heat what you want to make in a charcoal you're using you know the heat from the wood you're turning into charcoal okay you see how it's just starting to turn silver it's starting to ash up right there there's enough of this ashed up now that i feel comfortable adding on the next layer of big stuff and then a little bit of this medium stuff okay we started this about five o'clock it's about 7 45 now and it's about halfway full you can't really tell but halfway full nice charcoal layer on top it was getting a little more burned over here than it was on this side so i had some fresh wood there but once this silver is up just add another layer have no fear the calvary is here okay we got half of it silvered up and it's quickly spreading to the other side so we're gonna throw on a new load of large and medium okay so we just finished adding all the medium-sized sticks as you see how the old ones are this way and these new ones are mostly this way lots of room for that fire to come up in between those gaps and light all this stuff on fire okay we are mostly silvered on top and we're about three quarters the way up it's getting kind of dark so i'm going to end this bring this up now you can cheat and get a little extra out of it up there i've got a bunch of stuff that's about pinky size no finger size i'm going to throw that on top of there then cap and the residual heat will fully carburize the her carbonize those pieces help if i had the rings fully spread you go now this lid is old and rusty so i gotta throw some dirt on the holes okay that's about good now i can take my shovel fill up all those holes okay well i'm gonna finish throwing dirt up against the bottom of this and come back tomorrow morning and extract our charcoal okay it's the next day the barrel has cooled down now i've already dug out the dirt around the vent holes but uh one thing i like to do before i open it up tip it over is take a stick and make sure all my vent holes are clear for the next firing and i'll do that all the way around which there we go i have already done but now i can open up the lid the masses of charcoal in here now some of the stuff that i threw on top probably right here on the end it looks like it hasn't completely charcoalized but this side of it did but up here on top this stuff i throw in at the end it doesn't always charcoal but below that that's just pure charcoal i'm gonna switch you camera angles and show you what i do from here okay first thing i'm gonna do is take all the pieces that obviously didn't burn chuck them into the pile for next time which i have already done just that there's the last one and this is what i use to sort my charcoal it's uh you get these from tractor supply but it's technically a poop scooper with a basket but i'll take that and i'll rake out all the sticks and debris where i'm gonna dump it and then i'll just dump all the charcoal out right here return the barrel to its perch and i have a mass of five gallon buckets that i will just scoop classify dump classify down rinse and repeat until i have this pile gone and then i can commence another burning when i need it well i hope the information presented here helps you and i'd like to thank james for helping me amass the massive amount of wood it took to uh make all this thank you and i've enjoyed being amongst a successful charcoal making endeavor as mine have not been so successful in the past but now i know how to do it thanks jared here thanks for watching see you in a minute that's great you

Channel: Veteran Iron&Outdoors

Views: 900,833

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Id: bk-4qlYz-20

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021