Cooking Charcoal for Sparks

[usapyro]

Research shows that the longer and hotter charcoal is cooked the more it gets slowed down. Longer lasting sparks?!?

 

Has anyone here experimented with cooking charcoal to real high temperature and seeing if there is an improvement in willow or TT stars?

 

If you want sparks you would think it would make sense to cook out the volatiles as much as possible. Charcoal needs to be cooked to above 320C to convert it from wet black powder charcoal to dry black powder charcoal. It reduces the oil content around 7%. If I get time I am going to try an experiment.

 

 

I am going to cook pine charcoal in a very well sealed retort and bring it to glowing red for 30 minutes after the gas production from the cooking begins to slow way down. Then I am going to compare it to pine charcoal that has been cooked normally. That is where you stop cooking when the gas production slows and all the wood is charred enough to break up. I will make willow stars milled and wetted the exact same time and way and see if there is a difference.

 

If anyone has done experiments like this I would be very interested to hear about your results.

Edited October 24, 2012 by usapyro

[FlaMtnBkr]

The volatiles are what give the sparks. Cooking them all out is just going to give pure (well, close to it) carbon. The carbon will glow when hot but as soon as the heat is removed it will cool down and go back to being a piece of carbon. Try some coarse graphite if you want to see what pure carbon looks like. I think you will be really disappointed. That's why wood that has a lot of resin (volatiles) normally make the best sparks. While white wood with less volatiles make hotter BP with few sparks.

[Mumbles]

I don't know if that's entirely true. In my mind there are two classes of volatiles. Those which are present in the raw wood, and those which are created in the charring processes. I will agree that woods with higher concentrations of volatiles (like sap, sugars, etc) in the raw wood tend to create better sparks. This would include things like pines, honey locust, etc. You'd think maple, at least sugar maple, might also be in this classification too. Perhaps it's just that the "Raw" volatiles caramelize or whatever inside the wood and don't leave as easily.

 

I see volatiles thrown around more regularly with respect to burn speed. You want volatiles to increase burn speed. This is one justification for cooking at lower temperatures as opposed to just heating it into oblivion. To me, this is more to avoid the removal of the created volatiles.

 

On a sort of related note, I've always wondered if you could add additional sugars or tars into a wood source to increase it's spark producing ability. Maybe something like honey or seed oils might be able to be soaked into the wood.

[AirCowPeacock]

How about Terpintine? Seeing as pine is generally regarded as good for sparks.