6 replies to this topic

[Bailey]

Just wondering if anyone has any experience of this type of bp. Have seen a couple of videos on you tube and it seems quite fast.

Anyone rate this better than willow bp? Is it too fast?

[Arthur Brown]

The quality and type of Charcoal is the most important aspect of BP. Someone on here has used and reported newspaper BP but starting with a certain ingredient gives you a possibility of a certain quality of BP.

[Bailey]

Thanks Arthur. I did a search but found nothing. Any chance of pointing me in the right direction?

[Bonny]

I have read that using newspaper can be hit or miss from one batch to the next. as As Arthur Brown said, quality charcoal is very important and making good quality CONSISTENT BP is the name of the game. Unless you have no wood sources, why bother?
You can make very good BP with many types of wood.

[Arthur Brown]

No! Because their findings were that it was a possible but very poor source of charcoal and not reliable or repeatable!

Charcoal from good traditional timber - Willow Alder etc is highly preferable Grapevine makes for very fast charcoal - towards dangerous! BBQ lumpwood is for slow BP. BBQ briquettes are for BBQs.

Keep reading find the old and long BP threads read them all from their start. Good reliable BP is the first step to good other things.

[pyrotrev]

It raises the interesting question whether different types of newspaper would give different burning rates - perhaps the slowest would be from the Grauniad, whilst the fastest from The Star perhaps?

Edited by pyrotrev, 20 November 2008 - 01:23 PM.

[bigtonyicu]

MANY MANY years ago I decided to make my “Yellow Pages” (phone book) suffer so I stuffed a few of them in my 5 gallon retort and ball milled all of it together, I had very consistent results but that could just be cause it was an average of everything. It gave a VERY fast BP, too fast for most application (maybe useful for weak BP salutes), but I don’t know shy I could not granulate it for the life of me… it also had a few other down side, even before milling it’s for all intent and purpose “air float” right out of the retort, large flakes would float off by simply opening the container, I usually make large batches of charcoal and mill it as needed but found it too be too much of a pain so I milled all upfront and just wasted most of the powder using them with Mg salutes. So as others have said… not worth your time you’re better off buying a few 2x4s.