Charcoal

Making charcoal is one of the easiest things we can do for ourselves and it is a very useful life saving skill as it is the preferred treatment for those suffering from poisining as people mix it with water and drink it, or the medical profession gives it in tablet form, it is the main ingredient in many types of filter such as water filters and this is useful to know so we can make our own filters if we are in a situation where we are stuck, it makes artists materials for drawing, and it even burns hot enough to melt metals if a little forced air is applied, so what is charcoal.

Charcoal is woody material which id burned in a deficiency of oxygen as this dries out the wood and actually burns it without any flames, or turning it into ash and most types of woody material can be burned for charcoal with notinng more than a fire and an enclosed steel container, to make charcoal you follow a very simple procedure for any type of charcoal irrespective of if you want to make artists charcoal for drawing, or you want to make charcoal for crushing to make filters for water filtration.

We begin with small charcoal of about 6mm (1/4") diameter and take a tin with a sealed lid, old paint tins with a tightly fitting lid are ideal, we punch a small hole in the tin lid to let the pressure out which should be 1-2mm diameter, any more and this will let oxygen in and the wood will ignite and burn, we fill the tin with pieces of wood of the specified diameter and punch our hole in the lid and put the lid onto our tin, we place this into the embers of a fire and leave it for about 60-90 minutes and let the fire burn, when the time has expired we remove the tin and place it to cool, this is the indirect heat method. This gives us lots of pieces of charcoal for artists to draw with which are of the correct diameter from nothing but wood waste and a bonfire, and its free.

We can make larger pieses of wood into charcoal using the direct heat method and to do this we need a metal 5 gallon drum, we turn it over and on the bottom we find the centre of the drum and mark it, we then draw a 2" (50mm) diameter circle around this and punch 6 holes in the bottom of 2-3mm diameter, we cut out the top so the drum flange is intact, and then take a piece of steel of sufficient size to cover the top of the drum and drill a 1/2" (12mm) diameter hole into it, next we cut several pieces of wood just shorter than the inside height of the drum and use material of around 2" (50mm) diameter. This wood is split lengthways in half, we take a 4" diameter piece of wood and stand it in the centre of the prepared drum and put our prepared wood around it until our drum if full, we then remove our 4" diameter log and stand our drum on bricks or similar as this allows air to flow under the drum to feed the holes we punched into the bottom of our drum.
We light a small fire and use small material, we let this burn nearly to embers and scoop these up with a small shovel and fill the cavity left when we removed our 4" central log until it is 1/2 to 3/4 full and leave it for a couple of minutes to allow the fire to establish itself and them place our sheet of steel over the top of the drum with the hole above the smouldering embers, this allows the fire in the centre of our drum to continue smouldering without igniting and the wood gas and steam to escape, Every hour we slide the top steel cover back and check the progress of the central fire and add more embers to top it up to around 3/4 full and replace the top cover. In around 4-6 hours we have charcoal in lengths which can be snapped off for the barbecue and bagged up for future use.

We can take some of our charcoal and make a simple water filter using only recycled materials and out charcoal and to do this we take some of our charcoal and crush it down to a fine powder and we can do this by using a metal tray and a rock and crush the charcoal down as finely as you can, the finer the better, and if you have a mortar and pestle you can coarsely crush the charcoal and finely grind it using the mortar and pestle.
Next we need fine gravel which we can find at the edge of our dirty water, we take several scoops of this and thoroughly dry it out, we sieve the fine material into another container and keep this fine sand, we take the coarser gravel and put this into another container and we are ready to make a water filter.

We take two identical plastic bottles, we unscrew the top from one bottle and cut the bottom off it, we drill a hole in the cap of about 5mm diameter and screw it back on, we cut the top off the other bottle and stand our other bottle on top of it with the cap going into our bottom bottle, we take a piece of fabric and push it down to the pierced cap of out upper bottle, we then add about 1/4 of a bottle of our fine charcoal on top of this cloth, we then take half this amount of the fine sand and put this on top of the charcoal, and the same amount of coarse gravel as the fine sand and place this on top of the fine sand, out filter is now ready.

We take our water from a river, creek, stream, or even our recycled water from our roof and put it into our home made filter, the top gravel acts as a coarse filter and removes any coarse material, the sand acts as a fine filter and removes anything else, and the charcoal absorbs anything else and the filtered water runs into our bottom bottle, you can filter it again if you like, and then it is boiled to kill off any bacteria living in the filtered water, and its so easy to do that anyone can make one.