Charcoal

I made charcoal yesterday. Here's how I went about it:

All my projects start off with a search on the Internet. This one didn't take long; making charcoal is easy and well understood. Still, I hadn't done it before, and I picked up some interesting ideas.

Charcoal is really just "cooked wood". You can make charcoal two ways; cook it indirectly, in a closed vessel heated from the outside; or you can fire it directly, burning some of the charcoal to cook the rest of it. I opted for the second way, since it is simpler.

My wood is from the gasifier fuel supply. It has been processed into 2" cubes with a hatchet. Plenty of it around for charcoal making!

I have a good vessel already; the top half of a hot water heater, leftover from building the gasifier. I set it upright full of wood, and made some air inlets at the bottom. A little diesel fuel got things going. In no time at all, there was smoke pouring out the top:

I was worried that it was going too fast, and burning up all the charcoal. So I closed the chimney some:

And it promptly began distilling tar. Plus a good bit of moisture:

OK, so I need to let it burn some more. Opened the air valves, and let it go about an hour....then I shut it down, assuming I was done. After it cooled down, I tipped it over, and found a lot of tarry brown wood. Only a  little was charcoal. But as I was sorting through it all, the smoke started back up. I think the fire was trying to tell me something - It wasn't finished yet.  Patience is a virtue.

So once more I assembled the cooker, and smoke came pouring out. I let it go a long time, maybe two hours. Then I put some dirt around the base, to seal the air holes and slow the fire down, but I left the chimney open. The fire continued on, eventually slowing down after a couple more hours. Once I saw that it was nearly finished,  I closed off the vents again and left it for the night.

Here's what I found this morning:

Beautiful, well formed charcoal. There were still some unfinished pieces, I set them aside. I could have let it go even longer, and converted those too. All told, I got a heaping 5 gal bucket full:

So now I know how to make this. I think I could keep us supplied with some charcoal for the smoker and the gasifier. It's not hard - I could scale up to bigger batches quite easily. But for now I'll take it one bucket at a time.

Imbert Gasifier footage from WWII: Transcription

Awhile back, I reposted this video from Bioenergyken, with footage of WWII Imbert gasifiers. They spoke in Swedish. You can roughly guess what they are saying, but not for sure. So.......

I found a transcription! From Fred Ivar in Norway, via the GEK Wiki :

[NOTE: I edited and cleaned this up a bit.]

Hi,
I am Norwegian and I understand Swedish pretty well because of the similarities in the language.
I made a very rough translation. It is not very accurate because my English is not good enough. It seem like the clip is some kind of a informational goverment news report or advertisement from the TV.
Anyway, here it is:
(First something I did not get)
The torpedos with the warlike look is a paracytilen gas tube which is driving this... ( video cut)
A gengas generator is challenged by... ( a little blurry but I think he is talking about coal)
This is a little presentation of generators for (coal?) and wood. Both fuels have their pros and cons, but there is no doubt that wood has great potential to become more popular.
It is cleaner and cheaper, and everything from heavy trucks to motorcycles is now driven on gengas.
Never before has the logger's work been appreciated than it is now, or the Swedish woods as valuable. Who would believe only a few years ago it was possible to drive a car on some wood chunks.
Now it is a fact that a great quantity of our timber is transformed to engine fuel. You chop it into nice small pieces and then it is ready to be used. Here is a bus driver stirring his generator. It is nice and easy and he does not get dirty. This is some of the pros of gengas.
After some details and pictures from the construction department where the generators are developed on paper, we go to down the casting area. And here the theory start to become reality.
We have been given the oportunity to have a look behind the scenes to observe how an Imbert generator is made.In this machine the sheet metal is rolled (...and he cracks a joke about how it is "rolling" sort of...)
The Swede has always been known both as an inventor and mechanic and this type of industry put both his workmanship and mind to great tests. But having passed the test really well is proven by the traffic not halting, but rather the opposite.

And in the gengas industry no wheel stands still. No arms or hands are resting. The most modern equipment is brought to use and the best craftsmen are working under high pressure.
For the layman observing ... (and something I did not understand. Some kind of joke I think)
The welding is a very important detail when it comes to gengas generators. One could say one is working with... (and some other joke I did not understand. Sorry... :-/ )
Yes, and this is how the production proceeds. One after another. And soon also a layman can see something starting to look like a generator. Here is the inner part placed in its housing. Nice and easy.
The lid is put on and holes are drilled. And this is how a generator looks like inside.

The production is going on at an amazing speed. The demand is very high. Whole rows of generators stand ready for delivery. And in the end the paint is quickly putting color on it all. And at last one is ready to mount the generator to the car.
For many car owners it is a golden moment when the car can be taken out from the garage and start rolling again.
The bus takes us to and from our work. In the morning we get our newspaper and milk as usual. The milk bottling plant has more than 500 trucks with Imbert generators. We have had a look in the busy morning hour.
The bottles shine on the car and to the right you can see the bottle that is powering it all; the gengas generator.
All too long the beloved car has been resting because of gasoline shortage. The time waiting to get going has been long and hard. But the ones who at last has got a generator on the car (...and something I did not understand, -again) and it does not take long before the wagon is goning on a long trip.
Here comes the happy family ...(blah, blah).. ...and out in the beautiful white landscape. But a car does not drive longer than the fuel supply. And how is the status quo in the matter now? He has obviously stopped to have a look in the container.
The fact is easily observed by lifting the lid. And there is not much left. Oh, well he will have to use the reserve he has in the bag. Quickly it is put into the pan. Nice and easy it goes and no one get dirty. Just keep the pan boiling and drive on.
And swiftly it goes forward along the road as it swirls like a serpent trough the woods, edged by white snow walls.
What is going on now? Is the wood already burned out? No, he simply want to have a look at the map to see where the closest station is. (And then something about a 1 km down the road there is a "torp"?)
Everything is settled, and here is just one of the advantages of a wood generator. It is very easy to handle the fuel problem. One kilometer is made swifly and happily and the idyllic "torp" is lying just where it is supposed to. Elegantly he turnes into the farm, and introduces himself to the farmer - who for the first time in his life is functioning like a gas station. Sorry, wood-station I guess it is supposed to be called.
(Then I can't catch everyting but it is something like "Just roll up your sleeves and bring out the axe. Top Swedes are we everyone") Just split the wood into bricks. Bring the fine wood first into the bag and then in the pan. The car run swiftly down the road and the farmer is left standing to think quietly about new inventions and ideas...

Thanks to Fred Ivar in Norway!

DoggyBook update

I have been making progress on converting the Handbook of Biomass Engine Systems. I have actually been doing it off-site and updating the site periodically, since I came across some really good free tools for doing the job locally. One is a program called Calibre. It can convert any ebook format into any other, and has an excellent book organizer/library system. I would rank it as the Itunes of ebooks. The other tool is a program called Sigil. This is a full up ebook editor. The program is basic but easy to use. Sigil uses the Epub format, which seems to be the most common type. It takes a little poking around to figure out what an ebook is actually made of. The bottom line surprised me a little. Most ebooks are actually based on HTML, the same as a webpage. The specific type is called XHTML, and an ebook is just a collection of these pages, usually one for each chapter, plus some labeling/metadata, a stylesheet, and whatever images you included. All zipped up in a containing folder. So the nitty-gritty of editing can be a lot like editing basic HTML (no fancy webpage stuff, it's mostly text); Sigil offers WYSIWYG as well as straight code editing. It is easy to work with. Unfortunately, trial-and-error can be slow, because the file must be converted to MOBI for the Kindle (done with Calibre), then the old file must be manually deleted and the new file inserted. Kindle is not really designed to have "updated" versions of books; the assumption is that once a book is loaded you don't need to change it.

Another issue I have run into is the e-conversion of tables. The Kindle's screen being very small, anything that doesn't "wrap" well has to either shrink, making it hard to read, or be reformatted somehow. For now I have just inserted them as images, meaning they shrink to fit the page. At least the information is there, and will be distributed with the book. As for reformatting all the tables, the brilliant idea lightbulb has yet to go off. I may think of something yet.

Since ebooks are based around HTML, it seems like there should be a good way do make a simple website into an ebook fairly quickly. I am thinking of the MetroWiki, of course. And if DoggyBook could have a dynamic link that allowed me to grab the current content for compiling and ebook, I would go back to online editing.

Rambling thoughts.....

DoggyBook

DoggyBook is an open project to digitize books, pamphlets and papers for use in E-readers like Kindle and Nook.

I have recently gotten very interested in the availability of classic texts in digital format. The reason? Dad just bought himself an Amazon Kindle 3 e-reader, and he lets me use it as well. Most of my reading list is older technical manuals, but many of them are PDF format. The text is "frozen", and will not wrap to fit a small page.  Many of these PDFs are actually scanned as images, making them very inflexible. You can view a page "fit to screen" (very small) or full size (hard to navigate). So I have been converting  the Handbook of Downdraft Gasifiers Engine Systems to a more "e-friendly" format. This is a government publication in the public domain.

After looking around, I discovered that the process of digitizing an old book consists of three major steps.

1) Take a snapshot of the physical page, using a scanner or similar device. This can be exported directly for "snapshot" PDFs.

2) "Read" the text on the page using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which leaves you with an unformatted mass of misspelled text - but text nonetheless. All images, tables and equations must be skipped by the OCR, as they only produce garbled nonsense. 

3) The text must be spell-checked (mostly by hand), edited back to original formatting as much as possible, and the images and tables added back in as graphics. This is the human element, and this is why so many older texts are only available as PDF snapshots. Once formatted properly, it can be saved out to an e-book format like epub or mobi.

It is a lot of work, especially if you are not in the business of doing it. I have found some free tools to help with the job. First is Adobe Reader. Most versions will export to a text file. The only catch is, there has to be some text to export. "Snapshot" PDFs are only images, no text. So instead, we need FreeOCR, reportedly the heart of the Google Books OCR software. It is plain and unadorned; you see a panel with the PDF page, draw a box around the text area, and hit "Convert". Depending on the amount of text, each chunk takes about a minute to process. Then you see in the other panel, the plain text output. Copy this to a Word document, then clear the cache and do some more. I did a 140 page book in about 2 hours. Then you have a massive .doc file. Books this size are difficult to work on with a slow PC like mine, so breaking it into chapters makes sense. 

Then I decided to move the whole project out into the open, so that more eyes can help spot the typos. I created a wiki called DoggyBook, and the whole text is posted on various pages there. I will continue to edit it online as I can, and maybe interested folks will join me and speed this thing along. Periodically I will compile the whole thing as a .doc file and post it for download on the front page. Eventually, all the typos will get smoothed out, and images will be inserted in the right places.

This is only worth the effort for a special book. In the area of biomass gasification, this is certainly one of the classic texts. In fact, it is still in print - the Biomass Energy Foundation will sell you a spiral bound photocopy for $35. But nobody has it available for e-readers yet. I aim to fix that.