Chaoscorp

<dyslexia> so I do apologize,  as for date stamp that's my mistake. Also I will keep you all posted on eye candy once I've managed with the crude prossess to create something

Hey so as an answer to this question on how to make coke good enuff for smelting harth steel.... I perfer coke that's wood based carbon.. take a bunch of wood put it in a sealable non flammable container. Ie:(metal drum, box car on a train) essentially yeah light it on fire! Let it burn for a little tell you know its burning good, then close her up! And wait. This is only the first step to makeing your char Cole.... and yes like the others mentioned it's the second burn of the Cole that will produce (coke) and to do this you can do as they say for the black smithing forge, or if you need alot for say smelting.... i believe thorugh my tests that once you get the Cole back ablaze to where they are glowing. I would seal it up and wait a bit for it to cook and decrease in themp then dump it out in a line and give it all a shower with a good sprayer that is a large cone... (just putting out the heat... you dont want your coke to keep burning) feel for hot spots... then you needs to sive through , big, mid, small, ash. A good indicator that you have coke is that the wood turned to black chunks, cooked hot enuff with little to no oxygen. Makeing some nice hard chunks of coke. Test em by trying to break or crumble by hand. .... 

I my self have been trying to make primitive steel/ iron in to anything... managed to create 2 blooms using fin barbi Q brickets... hit with a hammer splits in 4x1in chunks... sooooooo many clinkers...... not worth the price for smelting... but is good enuff to forge if you dont mind having to dig in there and pull out all them large clinkers... so I have been digging in to old videos of how a blast furnace smells steal and learned some valuable info as to take iron dust from the ground with a magnet, pan it for impurities and dibre, mix it with some borax and carbon dust from makeing Cole, then cook it... let it cool and break it in some smaller chunks to feed in to my harth forge... ( tryed to use the raw dust with all sorts of impuratys, just dumping it in with a scrap charge of some sort of metal) that's my first bloom. I had little hope but I pulled out a chunk the size of a grapefruit 

On 3/4/2009 at 1:29 AM, Duckpond said:

i built a charcoal retort also known as a pyrolyzer or charcoal kiln,
i used a 44 galon drum with a beer keg inside and returned the volatile gasses to the fire chamber. It works well, and i intend to build a larger one from brick and iron. I also wondered if i could coke coal in it.
I googled coking coal, and go a few industrial recipies, indicating that a temp of over 2000C was needed, however i doubt that forges get to that temp, so perhaps the coking done in a forge is less complete or something. Dunno

does anyone know a way to check if coal is coked enough?

Try to break it by hand its alot harder then Cole, and looks burnt like ash but not. I find it after I used my DIY forge/harth, I sive through the ash and pull out any chunks I can use that's coke and put the Cole back... saving up small amounts after every use...