Briquette Making - Clamp and Stand

These two items from the list of the briquette making components essentially form the "machine" that will allow the briquetting compression to happen. The rest of the components are merely accessories that will facilitate the briquette-making process.

Although the clamp is easily available in most hardware stores, the clamp stand needs to be fabricated (more on this later) and customized for the clamp. Shown below is the clamp mounted on the stand.

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Briquette Making - Pail and Tray

Since you will be mixing various biomass ingredients for briquette making, big plastic pails or vats are suitable containers for this purpose. The wide mouth of these containers will make it easier for you to mix the ingredients and transform them into a slurry.

Plastic Pail

For the actual making of the briquettes though, you may want to use a smaller pail with a handle. Using a smaller pail will allow you to move it around for getting the briquette ingredients. It will also be convenient enough to raise it on the sink counter. The briquette ingredients are easier to reach and get from inside a small pail (shown yellow, below) when filling up the mold.

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Briquette Making Machine Components

In a recent entry, I wrote about the workplace where I make my homemade briquettes. Biomass briquettes can come from various ingredients and so the entire process may be a bit messy. Use an apron to keep dry.

In the absence of an affordable commercial machine for home use, you could easily fabricate the various parts that will up the briquetting machine. Shown below are the parts of the homemade briquette making machine. The parts are numerically labeled and briefly explained.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Preparing the Paper Component of Briquettes

In a previous entry, I mentioned that paper has good binding properties that helps create a briquette that doesn't immediately fall apart. It's actually the fibers of the paper that has this.

Cutting or shredding the paper (with a paper shredder) like in the picture breaks down the paper in size. The clean cuts do not however expose the paper's fibers.

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Homemade Briquettes

In a previous entry, I discussed the common materials used for briquettes and in another, a background on some commercial briquetting machines.

The briquettes I create for our cooking are essentially made up of paper waste, sawdust and a little of other agricultural waste. The batches of briquettes I have made vary in color because of differing constituent mix. These briquettes are small and measure roughly 2 inches in diameter.

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Briquette Machines

In a recent post about briquettes, the ones shown look really neat and most likely were produced from briquette machines like those pictured below.

All of them, from the biggest machine that looks like a mini-power plant to the smallest machine that looks like a creature out of a "Transformer" movie will require some space and electricity. The large-scale production of briquettes for these machine will generally be for commercial purposes.

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Materials Used for Biomass Briquettes

The usual materials used for biomass briquetting are agricultural wastes. Examples of agricultural wastes include rice hull (shown on the left), corn husks, coconut shells, grass clippings, dried leaves, dried sticks and so on.

However, many non-traditional "wastes" have been incorporated into biomass briquette-making. Commercial wastes such as sawdust, paper and even charcoal powder have been used successfully in the production of biomass briquettes.


In the briquetting process that I've devised, I've had varying results in the use of some of the above mentioned biomass materials. Since the process involves compaction, the materials would behave differently when compacted.

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What are Briquettes?

According to Wikipedia,

"a briquette (or briquet) is a block of flammable matter which is used as fuel to start and maintain a fire. Common types of briquettes are charcoal briquettes and biomass briquettes."

Wikipedia continues,

"Biomass briquettes are made from agricultural waste and are a replacement for fossil fuels such as oil or coal, and can be used to heat boilers in manufacturing plants, and also have applications in developing countries. Biomass briquettes are a renewable source of energy and avoid adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere."

I've especially taken interest with biomass briquettes to fuel our cooking in our wood stove. And I was able to devise a briquette-making machine that creates home-made briquettes. This briquette-making process will be the topic in forthcoming entries in this blog. Watch for them!