After a lovely summer holiday I’ve been back in the wood for the last three weeks or so.
Fresh from a steel fabricator in t’North there arrived a new stainless steel burner chamber for the charcoal retort. My eldest brother had passed the design onto a guy he knows who has faithfully reproduced the original dimensions but this time in lovely, shiny stainless steel. I’m not sure whether this will prove to be any more resistant to the heat corrosion that the mild steel version suffered from but it certainly looks the part.
After some careful jiggling around the new piece was installed and it fits very nicely.
and, perhaps more importantly…..it works.
Sadly though the results of this first burn were perhaps the worst that I have ever had in terms of conversion from wood to charcoal. Lots of brown ends.
This was only my second hazel wood burn and I think that I simply haven’t applied enough heat for long enough. The result is that there is a lot of wood that has not completed the charring process and the charcoal that has been produced has a very tarry smell.
Yesterday’s burn seemed more enthusiastic in terms of the wood gas phase and I was particularly careful to maintain the heat for an hour or so after that phase to support process completion. Hazel is a significantly different wood from beech with different burning characteristics and I guess that is demonstrated in the apparently different ways that they perform in the retort. We will see once I open up the retort next week.
More next time………………………….
Tim Burr 