On Sep 20, 11:08 pm, Tim Lamb wrote:
Look up Silsoe incinerator. The agricultural college did some work
optimising the hole size and spacing. They used a raised mesh of some
sort to form a hearth.

http://adlib.everysite.co.uk/resourc...cineration.pdf
Tim Lamb

That's interesting, thanks for that.

The two rows of ventilation holes were to try to get it to act as a
gasifier, with a primary and secondary air supply. This burns much
more efficiently and cleanly than a simple fire for lots of reasons
that can be found on the internet.


On Sep 20, 11:54*pm, Grimly Curmudgeon
wrote:
On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:34:43 GMT,

Pickaxe-sized holes around the bottom.
Alternatively, one 2" hole near the bottom and feed it with blown air
from an old furnace blower. Everything burns cleanly.

25+ years ago I used to have such an barrel rubbish burner with the
ventilation holes as specified (pick-axe). I set up a blower with an
old cylinder vacuum cleaner; the hose on some of these could be
connected to the outlet if you needed a blower. Air was blown into the
bottom of the barrel through a 10' length of scaffold tube, so the
vacuum cleaner didn't get hot.

After getting it burning, I set the vacuum cleaner going. Burning
became very intense, all smoking ceased; 5 or 10 minutes later the
barrel was incandescent, literally red (bright) hot. It started to
collapse under it's own weight. Predictable; I'd made a blast furnace.

A small blower would do this very well; a fan from a dead boiler or
a car blower would do nicely. The latter would have speed controls.