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Date: | Thu, 30 Jan 2003 09:49:01 -0500 |
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The Hopewell Village Foundry in Pennsylvania, USA had a charcoal maker
exhibit and the hut he used to live in as the job took a lot of attention.
There, in the winter, most of the wood would be harvested, the race for
double barreled air pump coming a great distance, not on a river or stream,
on a spring. The wood would be stacked into a wide cone, like an upside down
funnel. The wood would be carefully stacked, on-top of embers from the last
effort, and banked over with soil, with an outlet in the top of the cone. A
rough hut was made of stacked wood right next to it and the docent there was
characteristically "black faced" by the job of maintaining the smoldering
rate at which the wood was transformed into charcoal with a long handled
rake before being stacked into the furnace (loaded from the top) and the
various layers of charcoal and oar...ore reduced to a molten mass at the
bottom of the furnace. It would then be drawn off, the correct layer of
molten metal, onto the sandy foundry floor, in a river into "pigs" and
ladled into molds.
Just a point about charcoal. I seem to remember someone working on a wood
burning "tornado" furnace producing "wood gas" to run an internal combustion
machine. Mazda rotary engines are flying, they use regular fuel same mileage
as aviation fuel. Once rotary obsessed, they are coming back. Model airplane
one is now only $350. NASA worked on the seals and similar design flies
video inspections under bridges and overpasses for the California DOT.
George
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