openspaceman

Sorry I misread your original post. I have seldom had to scrap a OEM nikasil cylinder, they normally survive seizures and only become U/S when gouged by a broken ring or other foreign object

Are you sure the bore is cleaned of any aluminium pick up from the last piston?

With the punctures I got I couldn’t afford anti freeze or calcium chloride, just parked it up for a few icy days.

If it's an even height stand measure a sample tree diameter at breast heigh and height, use this with tarif tables to get a tariff. The volume of a sample plot can then be estimated from the diameters of the sample plot, by reading off the tariff table. For a small area it's probably easier to fell an average tree, top it off at the diameter you can sell then take the mid point diameter and length and apply simple geometry PI times diam squared divided by 4 times length =PI()*D*D/4*l entered in a spreadsheet.

It seems to give me 154litres volume for the 14 34 I used on the County but I reckoned they held about 500 litre of water ballast, a calculation on the imperial size for volume of a torus gives me 650 litres, which is in the same ball park for 70% fill.

Have you asked : Astrak Strickland msttracks.com

Yes the soil will need to be a clay type. I originally saw this done in a report from Africa, probably early 60s, before pollution, AGW or biochar were even dreamt of, where a drott had dug the pit so it had a slope in and out and was probably 8' deep in the middle. Once burned the charcoal was covered with old corrugated sheets and then the soil pushed back on with the drott. Nowadays I'd probably ask on freegle for an old 250 gallon oil tank, insulate the sides with rockwool and cut the top off. I'd also load and unload mechanically. I did change the burn parameters on a kob pyrot wood chip stoker and this produced char and the ash system unloaded it to a sealed wheely bin. Alex English went one step further and dumped the char with an auger past a water seal which quenched it and maintained the induced draught in the boiler.

I know it isn't wise to inhale it as an aerosol, particlarly when welding, but it's only zinc oxide so fairly harmless as a powder. I've mentioned this before but ss depends on a layer of chromium oxide to prevent the iron being exposed to oxidation, this layer is acid soluble and can be reduced in anaerobic conditions, by definition the inside of a retort will become anaerobic. A father and daughter in india copied an idea promulgated by Yury Yudkevitch in Russia for multiple containers inside a combustion chamber such that their off gas contributed to the fire, the original idea being the retorts were cycled to maintain a serial stream of batches. They used ss retorts but whilst they did last longer than tin cans they had a limited duty cycle. Cast iron would be better as the graphite particles resist oxidation. Ordinary mild steel is generally good up to 700c on one side as long as the other is cooled to ambient but with a retort the outside is at or above this whilst thie inside is over 400C so they do burn out eventually. The thing to do is control the temperature outside the retort but this requires increased dwell time, which is why Yury had up to a dozen retorts in his devices. These steel cylinder retorts have heat exchange area limited to the walls of the retort and there is nothing to drive circulation in the retort. A the surface area ratio decreases as the retort size increases there is a size limitation. If the wood has any moisture this not only dilutes the offgas with steam but also increases the time the charge of wood takes to get to pyrolysis temperature. I suspect they need to be fire bricks, this is how the original town gas retorts were built and later modified by Lurgi, the manufacturers to make the crematoria used by Nazis. If you look at the pictures you will see they had cast iron doors. It should be possible to make a hybrid downdraught device similar to the simcoa charcoal plants used to make charcoal for smelting silicon but unless it could be inclined it would need to be quite tall and there would need to be dry feedstock to keep the throughput up. At least there would be plenty of spare drying heat. this charcoal making business goes in cycles like beef cattle systems, you start off with a dog and stick and some grass and then invest in buildings and zero grazing and expensive feeding and mechanised cleaning system, the kit gets old and the market drops so you abandon the buildings get a stick and a dog... Much the same with charcoal, you start with a fire in a hole in the the ground, then invest in a kiln and then a retort but you canno0t afford the wages so you revert to a hole in the ground.

Who said anything about banning them? In fact I think charcoal making still enjoys some exemptions from the various regulations which other industries are not granted.

I prefer corks, it suits my outlook on life. Not that I'm a luddite but our council chief executive did declare I was a dinosaur at a public meeting where I was defencding some open space but I digress: How does one tell it a bottle has a cork rather thanplastic bung? Is there a real cork label? Perhaps it would make part of the USP.

Much better than I could offer as I have never considered the subject other than in terms of conversion efficiency and pollution. Traditional kilns are highly polluting because they do not flare the pyrolyisis offgas, it is generally possible to flare the stacks toward the end of the burn when a lot of CO is being produced but early on when a lot of steam is vented with polycyclic aromatic compounds and methane in the mix the calorific value is too low to support an open flame. Methane is actually about 25 times more effective at capturing re emitted infra red than CO2 and although its life in the atmosphere is short it will become more significant as more is emitted from soil carbon stores. So a good clean flare flame is the best way to make charcoal burning acceptable, we actually flared ours inside a gas turbine for a brief but successful experiment. An earlier question about yield needs a bit of consideration. You can make a charcoal stick from oven dry pine with a yield of 45% of the dry weight but whilst it is undeniably charcoal it is not pure carbon. Heat the same stick to 900C instead of 400C and the yeild drops to 15% plus the carbon content is in the high 90s. So apart from the obvious point that you have to boil off any water before pyrolysis starts, and this will be around 50% of the weight in fresh wood, the yeild is highly temperature dependant. A retort run at the same temperature each time will produce the same yeild no matter what the initial moisture content but more support fuel is needed, a kiln will consume much of the charcoal produced in vaporising water so the yield plummets with high moisture content.

Kon Tiki is just an inverted lid and derives from traditional pit charcoal making, John Evelyn writes of using bavins on an open fire like this and quenching. One can do much the same with an open top 45 gallon drum if the material is dry enough, the offgas flame shielding the newly formed char from oxidation whilst simultaneously radiating heat back to the top layer, once char has formed add more wood. The most productive method I found was to use a traditional two ring kiln in June and grapple load it with lop and top felled in March, with all the cordwood above 3" already removed the raw material was both dryish and small enough to char quickly so the kiln was full off char in a morning. Big problem was then sealing the kiln well enough to prevent it burning away. Quenching would be fine for biochar. I found 50% of the char produced would riddle out and provide lumpwood within the bioregional B&Q spec but it had that ashy grey burned look rather than the shiny black metallic look of good BBQ charcoal. If your material is well dry, below 20% then a simple TLUD burn will yield 20% by weight of small <1" material in a 6" flue or ventilation pipe for small quantities of biochar plus it makes a nice patio heater.

I suspect the drivers for ukmail have a problem meeting quota as we have several deliveries fail because of no access to deliver, our yard is manned 6:00-18:00 each day. Their tracking system gets manipulated too, we had a parcel which was marked as signed for by "martin" at 10:34 one day. No one here called Martin so I checked the video for 10:-11:00 no sign of any deliveries. Walking about the yard I found the parcel in the car park, checked the cameras again and Ukmail driver arrives at 9:30 , drops the package and drives off with his rear door swinging, brakes at the road entrance which shuts the door and proceeds onward. Oddly enough I have good service from our local Hermes lady for outgoing stuff, she seems to collect and deliver in her own 4wd.

That too but it's normally possible to swap a drain plug with a breather.

The worm gear won't be lubricated

I assume you mean the piston is 4" diameter otherwise you need to subtract the cylinder wall thicknesses as Bob points out. If you aim for 2000 lb/inch^2 then given the surface a of the piston is ~12.5 inch^2 the ram will push just over 11 ton but at that flow rate you would need 22 horsepower in the fluid, at 70% efficiency you would need and engine capable of producing 32hp and this would assume the pump input torque matched the engine output torque

Yes there is a fair amount of historical evidence. It's contaminated with Benzo[a]pyrene a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon found formed as a product of incomplete combustion, so also in tobacco smoke and plain old soot. If it enters the body it is metabolised by the cells and the results are mutagenic. It's effect was first noted in young chimney sweeps and the scrotal cancer was the first recognised industrial disease. The same scrotal cancer in young american mechanics was identified as coming from oily rags and clothing.

You'll need to scroll back to the beginning as the link came from elsewhere. Apart from how rudimentary the equipment was in 1959 this film shows how rushing headlong into increased food production after the war caused massive loss of habitat and probably led to recent flooding issues.

Picture? I still have some pellet burner bits and pieces but a rocket elbow is easy, the thing is it needs much more attention than a wood burner because you are effectively metering in the wood regularly. Also excess air is difficult to control.

Much as I thought too. These Agas are high mass low power things, so run constantly, a 10kW pellet burner running on dry woodchip would average out around 3 kW but the hopper and auger would need to sit either to the side or in front of the Aga, In retrospect there would be no need to cut into the Aga. The only advantage apart from cost is in being able to use existing plumbing and heat exchanger. My boss sold an aga or rayburn when he bought a new house about 30 years ago, got a good offer for it but it basically fell to bits internally when it was moved so it went for scrap.

The one I referred to is an Aga and you can see from the pic it would not easily convert to logs, hence my earlier post. With the cost of annual maintenance (obligatory by trained aga technicians because of our internal and external audits) plus the fact the wicks quickly clogged up on the kerosene it shared with an oil boiler it had already become uneconomic even before we got gas. Shame about the latter as it sidelined the 150kW woodchip boiler and the bosky never got installed.

No only "linked" businesses are allowed to operate with the same licence, like two companies owned by another company. Each company also has to have an operating centre of their own even if it's the same physical space.

I took a brief look at the redundant one in the kitchen at work, there doesn't seem to be room for a wood burner but the wick is similar in size to a pellet burner so it may be feasible to add the ID fan from a pellet burner to the flue and use the ash pan and burner. You would need to cut a hole for the fead auger. The fuel hopper would need to be well sealed but by changing from an inclined auger to a horizontal one it may be possible to feed dry graded woodchip. An alternative would be to cram a rocket cook stove in there and feed it with long thin sticks. A rocket cook stove is typically around 5kW PS with warfarin no longer available for squirrel hoppers they would adapt as rocket elbows as long as zinc from the galvanising isn't an issue

How much spare heat do you have, after all you'll need to keep the digester warm? You have two very different types of material to dry, the limit on the rate of drying of the sawdust like stuff will be how much heat you can deliver to it, because its rate of receiving heat at its surface will be less than its rate of internal conduction, so it can deliver the heat into water in the middle of the particle before the surface gets too hot. Logs are different, as the outside gets drier it cannot conduct heat into the interior to volatilise water deep inside, so you have to deliver lower temperature heat to the surface over a much longer period. Logs will air dry, sawdust probably won't to any sensible depth. Logs present little resistance to air flow, air won't easily flow through sawdust. Even with a deep bed chip dryer using 40C waste heat the electricity costs for running the fans was significant. It cost us about 1 kWh of heat to extract 1 kg of water from logs in our dryer, we reckoned we could half that at the cost of much more expensive equipment. If one could maintain a clean burn by direct combustion of wood chip the losses in the flue stack even at 50%mc wwb are much less than a dryer in the absence of heat recovery. Given some of the above and if you are going to use the biogas produced in a spark ignition engine then a co current dryer for the sawdust like stuff using the hot (500C+) exhaust may be worth looking at, a rotary valve metering the envirobed into the exhaust and collecting the resulting material in a cyclone. The feedback loop being maintaining the cyclone at ~110C by varying the feed rate of the rotary valve. This would be more problematic with a diesel exhaust as there would be more chance of combustion.

This is just why I changed from Husqvarna oil to Stihl back in the 80s, it bright light I couldn't see the blue dye to be sure the petrol had been dosed with oil. I have migrated to the green Stihl oil now but would love a means of dipping it and seeing the petrol:oil ratio as I think the blokes can be a bit blasé about measuring the oil into the fuel. I see some suspicious cylinder damage but the fuel is always right by the time the saw gets back to me.