Secrets on the Grill

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Saturday, August 8, 2009

The Briquetting Workplace

The basic workplace for making the briquettes would be a sink. A sturdy table with a good catch basin would be a good alternative. Shown below is the basic setup I have at home. It is essentially a sink made of concrete at our "dirty" kitchen. It sometimes doubles as a place to wash clothes. =) There is plenty of space at the side for the briquette equipment and the pail containing briquette ingredients.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Preparing the Briquette Ingredients

In a previous post, I mentioned how paper should be prepared as a briquette ingredient. Two other ingredients I use on a regular basis are crushed dried leaves and sawdust.

Sawdust need not be broken down further. Just ensure that wood shavings and chips that typically come from wood planing processes are removed. Dried leaves need to be really dry and brittle that they break up when crushing with your fingers. A really neat tool is a mortar and pestle setup like the one below that's big enough to crush and grind huge amount of dried leaves into smaller suitable pieces. Of course a hammer mill would be convenient, but we're just talking of simple and no-cost tools here.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Briquetting by Compression

Apart from the "horse" briquette device, there are other manual briquetting machines out there. "Manual" here meaning hand-operated and without the aid of electricity or batteries.

Paper Brick Log Maker

Here's a very popular manual briquette maker that has long been marketed on the internet. It uses discarded paper or old newspapers to create paper logs. Wet the paper, put inside and squish the water out.