Matthew Groves

Well, if they just made a book that listed what the "good deal" price was, we could all follow it. I walked at $1200 for the 9" South Bend, quick change gears, 4 ft bed, all the chucks, collets and taper attachment, etc.

You all know the feeling. Nice machine, lots of tooling. You bid only so far. Someone else goes farther. Did you let a deal walk away? Should you have? Oh well.

My wife and I own an 1889 home here in the middle of Nebraska. I was noticing the other day the remnants of two "posts" near the street that I assume are bases for those conical cement hitching posts with the steel ring at the top. This got me to thinking about making new posts and I wondered if any of you had ever tried it. Anyone have some good pictures? Ideas you've seen/tried? If I went the all-steel route, what's the best way to mount something like this? Do I sink a galvanized "socket" into the sidewalk and put the iron post into it? It will be decorative, of course. How does galvanized deal with long term concrete contact?

Shoot, around here that might be a VERY good anvil. There's abused, and there's ABUSED. Does anything really need to be done to this anvil?

Now THAT is a great video. I wish there were thousands of those on all different techniques. Great stuff.

For sure there's a complex chemical procedure that is going on in that barrel, but I'm not able to explain all that. Basically, you're trying to drive off everything but the carbon (the water, the sap, the organics). This can be done with heat very easily. As we all know, heated carbon (coal, charcoal) makes a pretty darn good fire, so in order to not make AND burn your charcoal at the same time, you remove from the carbon the thing it really needs to burn....oxygen. This is the reason for the sealed up barrel, to prevent the oxygen from getting to that carbon that would just love to mix together and burn. Some do just build a fire in a barrel and then fill it with wood and then seal it up, but there's little control that way. I used a retort design that feeds the gasses from the wood down into the fire. Just because we're trying to drive those gasses off, doesn't mean we can't use them on the way out. They happen to be flamable, so why not use them to reduce the amount of wood you need to burn? As others have pointed out there's no fear of flashback at all because there's no air getting to the fuel in that sealed drum. NOW, here's what happened to us. We had "cooked" the charcoal, and had taken the barrel off the fire to let it cool. Being the impatient type, and wanting my buddies to see the final product (I think they were skeptical, aren't we all), we pulled the top off to take a look. So here I have this very much heated drum of what is now almost pure carbon, and what do I in effect give it, but all the oxygen it could want. What do you suppose happened? It flared up into a 55 gallon grill. Had I left it alone, it would have continued to burn until my whole batch of charcoal was nothing but ash. That would have been hours later, but it would have happened all by itself. Of course, not wanting to ruin the fruits of our labor, we slapped the lid back on (limiting again, the oxygen, and thus the ability to burn) and let it cool down all the way. long winded story, but a very fun excercise. Of course I'm not supposed to have open fires within the city, but that's what the bricks were for. I alerted my neighbors, and they were excited for me to try.

Well, I guess this applies to me now. My boys and I (3 and 5) made our first batch of charcoal in a drum last weekend. It's completely within everyone's reach. Even if you prefer coal or gas for your forge, you can use your results to smoke your ribs with. Pics here http://web.mac.com/mcgroves/iWeb/Hobbies/Charcoal.html

Keep these ideas and pictures coming. Very very helpful to the rest of us.

We'll be praying, Jr. They can do amazing things these days, let's hope it works. Matthew