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I Forge Iron

Home made charcoal briquettes


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You could certainly use homemade charcoal (see the various threads about making it), but briquettes (which are usually a combination of charcoal and binder, compressed with special machinery) are probably more trouble than they're worth.

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Most commercial briquettes have a fairly low percentage of charcoal and a lot of binder/anthracite/clay/etc  so making your own is going backwards from a good fuel used for forging for several thousand years to a bad fuel only used when there is nothing else.

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JHCC,

Forgive me for being somewhat pedantic.

But here goes. Many brands of briquettes (most?) are made of sawdust, glue and a black dye. YECH !!.

Some years back a fellow demonstrating at a blacksmith get together, used briquettes nd actually get the forge hot enough to forge weld some.

But it was a stunt and a struggle. I suspect that he uses coal, charcoal, or gas to smith.

JHCC is correct. You can make charcoal from scrap wood using a home made retort. And that information is here.

Is coal readily available in Abu Dhabi? Where does it come from. Is it very expensive? Also, I suspect that saw dust is not readily available!

But propane gas should be very reasonable.

I just noticed that Mr. Powers posted a reply whilst I was typing this entry. Sorry, then, for any redundancies.

Wish I could see the new Louvre which just opened.

SLAG.

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