My Coal Quandary

Picture it as kiln-fired crud! If it's in the mix,it'll do this. If You can't filter it out,Coal Jockey may have a point in diluting it,spreading it out. Try a batch. If it fails on a small batch,it won't prolong the pain if the whole Deal is diluted... Hell,it's worth a Batch shot....

LOL, I have to get the rest of this crap off the trailer before I can get some good stuff.

Man,still on the trailer.... There's got to be a way that You can develop some kind of "Turd Sifter" without losing Your Mind or blowing Your Upper Body out!!

I have been presented with the idea of setting loose coal directly on the ground, and frankly I'll tell you DON'T DO IT!

if you must put coal on the ground, Put it on a Polyethylene "Drop In Bed Liner".

My truck has a Rhino Lined bed-liner, but it still wears a drop in on top of it when I'm hauling coal!

Right now my coal is in two places 1) my dedicated outdoor coal bin is a truck bed with a bed-liner in it and a fiberglass topper on it that sits with the tailgate under the patio roof.
2) in the twin-axle dump trailer I pick it up in.

And even there I have a loose bed-liner on the ground where I shovel it into the pail to drag it inside one pail at a time. So, WHEN I spill some on the ground I don't have to work very hard to pick up whatever I spill... you can get them cheap (typically $23-$30) from most junkyards

They are durable and easy to shovel off of!

This coal was on a blue tarp for years. Unfortunately, the tarp itself gave up the ghost so that made scooping it up with the loader exponentially difficult. I have about a ton left on the trailer, I may do a set aside until I can get it cleaned up. I should have an answer on what's been going on with the restart later today when I empty the ash.

It takes about 3100° F to make glass, so it's burning well!

Update: I'm down to about 600-700# left on the trailer. It is the dirtiest. When I restarted, I used my years of experience in the glass industry to try and work around this issue. What I did was start the fire pretty low and built it big and fat. The result is, it doesn't run very often or hard. No glass or clunkers in the ash now so far. Keep the firing rate and temps down looks like a recipe for success running an Axeman on dirt.

There ya go - putting your noodle to it and you can do just about anything. I've got a couple hundred pounds of high carbon dirt from sifting the last of the UAE nut out off the ground. Tarp left this world during years of scooping nut off it.

It turns out that if you use an iron rake to roll it up in a pile you get a good amount of dirt out of it. Then it got real weird. The coal falling into the firetube now appears to be washed, LOL.

Just an update on this. I'm at the last few pounds of this stuff and it has been pretty easy to wade through. The beast was a little constipated again. Another giant clinker has been hatched. You can tell you have a monster in there when its ashing and the coal in the firetube rises up instead of sinking because the mass just rolls around instead of being ejected. I took a length of heavy 11/2" pipe and a hand sledge and busted it up fairly easily. It passed a few big chunks and now we're breaking out some bagged Blashack. Stuffed looked like it was hand washed individually compared to what's been going through it for months!

Coaledsweat glad you got it all burned up. Don’t forget to sell your clinkers!

GeezYou are the BTU Smash Master regarding this Caper!! Nice Job!!

That is unbelievable... I don't think there is anything else on the planet that could burn rocks/dirt and debris without self destruction lol. Stoker wise anyways...

Rumble rumble rumble.... Rumble rumble rumble....

It's a clinnnnkkkkerrrrr!

Tis the season.