Lime Squad IV: The pets, straw clay lime kilns.

“None of these goals and design parameters will be considered in a myopic sense.  Context must be considered with an assessment of cost benefit ratios in a holistic sense that includes values beyond convenience and control.”

After taking lime burning in a steel drum as far as we felt we could without adding something to the drum.  Tonia and I decided to venture off into building a kiln with available materials.  That was one goal- to explore the possibilities of available materials.  Another was to experiment with design changes in order to improve smoke and efficiency issues.  We decided to add a grate and a fire box to see where that would lead us and how effective burning the fire separate from the shells might be.  The metal drum taught us that we needed either insulation, or mass, or both together which I gave the silly, but relevant, name massulation. We thought of using some bricks that were around, but decided to go a little more primal using stuff we might be able to scrounge up anywhere.  That meant having a base which could support a grate.  We chose to use bricks for just the base because it was faster for our experimental purposes than mudding one up with cob, though the cob would probably have worked better.  We slapped some mud onto the outside of the bricks to seal most of the air leaks.  The base had a short firebox leading to a grate at the bottom of the column.

The Pet’s base, slapped together with bricks and then covered in mud, was a quick way to try out the idea of utilizing a fire box and a grate.

Lime Squad III: Burning lime in metal drums. Advantages, limitations and where to go from here.

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This update is loooong overdue.  In fact, it was started maybe as much as a couple of years ago, but never finished.  So overdue in fact, that I’ve divided it into two parts.  This part will deal with burning in a metal drum, while part two next week will assess some clay and straw kilns that were built later on.

Warning, extreme geekage ahead!  This will be TMI for most people, but hopefully useful for those who want to understand and pursue lime burning.  Although I think using a drum is not the greatest, I’m using it as a reference point to try to understand and relate the process as a stepping off point, because this has been our evolution.  Future posts may be more along the lines of “how to do this right”.  This article is somewhat of a chronicle of an evolution, but contains a lot of relevant ideas and information to help the would be lime burner better understand the issues involved.

Lime burning at Turkeysong is pursuing broad goals.  One goal is to make home-scale lime burning practical enough to use in development of infrastructure here on the land.  I’m also interested in assessing the practicality of burning lime for agricultural use.  A small amount of lime is already in use here for processing leather and rawhide, as well as for preparing corn for tortillas and hominy.  Other uses will no doubt arise, such as the tree trunk paint formula I’ve been working on and all sorts of building and paint projects.   Another goal or motivation, as always, is to be able to share this information out to the end of providing achievable alternatives for small scale builders and self reliant tinkerers.  I am encouraged by the results so far and am looking forward to experimenting more.  I wanted to offer some insights gained up to this point, both for the benefit of people who want to try burning lime on their own and also just to have it written down for future reference.

Understanding Forms of Lime

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I’ve just done this short post on understanding the different types of lime and some of their uses on the Paleotechnics blog.  I’m cross posting as I though that it would be of interest to some Turkeysong readers, so hop on over and take a look.

http://paleotechnics.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/understanding-lime-an-introduction-to-forms-of-lime-and-where-they-come-from/

LIME SQUAD! II: The Slaking

LIME SQUAD! I:   A PHOTOESSAY ON LIME BURNING

LIME SQUAD! II: THE SLAKING

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Having burned some sea shells into quicklime in photoessay part one, it was time to slake the shells into lime putty.

In the morning we went out to the kiln all excited and grabbed a few well-burned-looking shells for a quick experiment.  We put the shells into a dish and crushed them lightly with a spoon and added water.  In order to turn into calcium hydroxide, a.k.a. lime putty, quicklime has to undergo a chemical reaction with water which creates a good deal of heat.  Well, our quicklime just sat there cold in the water, no churning and boiling :(  what a let down…   After getting over our initial disappointment it seemed just not right that our lime didn’t react.  The shells were completely white through and through.  So, we put the shells and water on the stove to heat a bit and that seemed to slowly kick off the reaction and eventually they broke down into lime putty.  That was encouraging, but it wasn’t time for the champagne yet.

I had pretty much decided that we should use hot water to slake at this point, but considering the time and energy we had invested so far we wanted a more informed opinion.  I called Jeff Price at Virginia Lime Works who generously spent a small piece of his morning in the pursuit of my edification in regards to lime and lime burning.  Sure enough, he recommended hot water to start it off when using shells because the structure of shells is less conducive to the slaking process than the structure of stone.  The up side is that shells make more lime putty than an equivalent amount of burned stone.  I took my page of notes and was ready to rock.

The burned shells were added to an old wine barrel pre-charged with hot water.