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Never been in a chat room before, so bear with me. Just made a trip to West Virginia for a load of Sewell seam coal and lit my first fire with it today. Now, I want to say that this coal is the best processed I have ever seen. It is true pea coal: not one piece is bigger than a marble and 0 fines. I lit the fire, all green coal, and when it got going and it started smoking heavy i sprinkled some water around the edges like I'm accustomed to doing and it ran right through that stuff and put the fire out! Well, duh, there's no powder to slow it down. Well, got it going again, and as the afternoon progressed some other differences became apparent. for a while I kept raking coal up on the sides and top of the fire to form a cap while the stuff underneath coked up, but it didn't work, the fire just got way bigger than I needed. So I pulled a lot of it off to the side, and just burned the coked up coal that was there and it seemed to work well. And I learned something else: go ahead and use the blast. The fire isn't as tight as it would be with more fines, but there's plenty of heat if you put the air to it. i tried a couple of welds doing it that way and they worked all right, but don't turn your back!  One more thing. After 6 hours I pulled the fire apart and I couldn't believe how little clinker there was. I will try to put a picture here to show you. As I said, I just got this coal and started playing with it today. If anybody on here has experience with it I would like to hear how you work your fires.

Sewell coal.jpg

 

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12 hours ago, CapThrash said:

Never been in a chat room before,

To get the best out of the forum, I suggest you read this thread.

https://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/53873-read-this-first/

BTW: welcome to the forum (not a chat room).

The way I was taught to manage the coal fire by a master blacksmith is to not put green coal into an on going fire but to ring the green coal around the outside edge, which then turns into coke. The coke is then raked into the fire as needed. I never use water with my fire unless I want to put it out.

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To put a fire out, just rake it out of the fire pot and onto a table. If it does not go out on its own, then put the hot embers into a bucket of water. You can sleep well at night knowing everything hot is now covered by 2 inches of water. 

The coal is not wasted, just damp. Dump it out onto a tarp, or the ground, etc and let it day. Collect the dry coke and use it to start the next fire, or add to a fire when you do not want to produce smoke.

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