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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Hob Top Grill and Griddle

Late last year, DH and I bought this JML Hob Top Grill and Griddle on sale from SM Ace Hardware. For us, it was a welcome addition to our Superkalan Outdoor Stove for cooking.

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