Today, I brought you out to the mountains because a lot of you have been asking how to make charcoal and so today
I'm going to show you a really [easy] way to do it
Let's get started. now charcoal may not seem that sexy of a thing to make but it's actually very
Valuable we buy it in bags usually for grilling for summertime cooking
But it's also used for melting metals with the mini metal foundry some medical applications use it for extracting
Poisons out of your stomach, and you swallow something wrong
It's used in Air filters water filters and pyrotechnics for making black powder, so it's very versatile substance
and it's very easy to make now all you need to get started is some kind of a steel can like coffee can or a
Tuna can even a can of beans will work
I just went to the paint section of home Depot got one of these [1] quart paint cans. You can see it's empty
It's about two and a half dollars
But while you're there you may as well pick up some of these paint stir sticks as well
they're completely free you can usually get about as many as you want and these are what we're going to be using to make the
Charcoal itself now these paint sticks are obviously too long to fit in there by themselves
So we need to break them into smaller pieces
But the idea is to shove as many of them as we can get in there at once so let's get busy
Go ahead and cram as many pieces of wood inside the container as you can and if you're using something like a paint can be
Aware there's a liner here
That's gonna burn off you really don't want to breathe that stuff in just put your lid on securely
bang it into place like we would a can of paint and
Then we're going to need a vent hole right here on the top and you can use a screwdriver or something like a sharp pointy
Rock just to
make a nice little hole in the center that's going to act as a vent hole for letting out some of the pressure when it's
In the fire [now] [you] don't have to use paint stirrer sticks to make your charcoal in fact you can use any sticks lying around
The ground or [even] some leftover sawdust that works just as well
I've got three cans of wood here one is our paint stir sticks another one is filled with sawdust another one is random
twigs, and sticks down at the ground let's light up a fire and get these things roasting
now as the can starts to heat up you can see it [start] smoking and that's because all the
Gases inside the wood are being [released] that's hydrogen. Methane and all kinds of other things like acetone pitch
Just a ton of stuff and we're getting that all out of the wood and because there's no [oxygen] in there
The wood is going to Char, but it's not going to burn that fire's getting pretty healthy
So let's throw all three of them on at the same time (oh no, this is a bad idea)
Now when this smoke starts pouring out enough and this gets hot enough you're going to notice that this
smoke actually catches on fire
Create a very flammable gas that some people called wood gas and in some countries [like] in Germany to use that on their vehicles
looks like that one, may be done
Those other ones, they're so tightly I can't even get to without it burning my fingers
Ha oh, no my charcoal caught on fire
So apparently if there's too much pressure building up in there the whole lid might pop off
Now you can see this one still has a flame coming out of it
But the other two have gone out that means these ones are done
We can take them out of the fire and let them cool down for about 10 minutes
All right all of our containers are pretty much stopped smoking
it's important to you something like [a] stick or a piece of aluminum foil to
Cover that hole so no air or sparks fall down into that charcoal and be carefully don't touch these they are
Extremely hot they're going to need about [5-10] minutes [to] cool down before you can really touch them now
It's been about 10 minutes
And this can is very cool to the touch [so] [let's] go ahead and remove our stopper and hope that no sparks cut down inside
There, but even if they did I don't suppose the bullet on too much damage at this point now
We need to do is take something like a sharp rock a screwdriver or even a sharp stick to pry this lid off
So [we] can pick out inside and see what we just made , there we are
and look at that our paint sticks to virtually been reduced to half their size and look how they've turned completely black and
C R I S P Y
Mmm. Look how everything's shrunk down in size it's quite a bit smaller and even bigger sticks like this that used to be tough to
Break you can break em' easily, and they're black all the way through now. I'm excited to see how this one turned out
This is the sawdust
Which I'm hoping will save us a little bit of work trying to grind the charcoal down into Powder
[it's] just I had this one filled up to the top so let's see how it came out
[that] is weird look at that
almost looks Like Chunky biscuits
So if you compress these together you can make your own charcoal briquettes out of sawdust look at that.
Well there you go. I'd say that it was a complete success. We turned stir sticks
Sawdust and sticks. We found off the ground into charcoal and there's a hundred applications. You could use this stuff for which
I'll probably show you in future video, but in the meantime if there's anything specific
You'd like to see me do put your comments down below and maybe I'll make it happen
and we'll see you in the next video talk to you then