About a month and a half ago, right at the end of my sabbatical, I went on a interview with the company AutoDesk for a position working on their Inventor product. In the end, I didn’t get the job; they went with an internal transfer, but the experience was a great learning experience for me […]

In the continuing saga off no-smoke charcoal making, I’ve added air injection to the system.
In recent runs, I could tell the fire wasn’t getting enough oxygen. There were a couple reasons I knew this.

when running just the stove, I got a red jet flame out of the top. A picture from a previous post:
If […]

actually this is take four.

exit hole on top. Mistake. lots of uncombusted smoke

exit hole on bottom. Better, but still lots of smoke

pipe extention to inject smoke into the heart of fire. That worked, but the ducting I was using still leaked smoke.

today’s experiment

Somehow, the thought of using an old paint can came to mind. I […]

 
For those of you that read my blog through an RSS reader, I changed the categories on a bunch of posts. This will probably cause them to show up for you again. Nothing else about those posts is different.

When wood burns, what’s really going on?
As I understand it, it’s a 2.5 step process.
1) Heating the wood causes it to vaporize into its component molecules.
1.5) depending on the temperature, the longer, more complex molecules decompose into simpler molecules. Larger molecules don’t burn as well. Axle grease doesn’t really burn. Gasoline does. If you heat […]

say you’re sitting in a boat in the middle of a pond. In the boat with you, there’s a big rock. You chuch the rock into the water and it sinks to the bottom. Does the surface level of the pond go up or down?
computer programming puzzle: say you have a string like “the cat […]