Robert Galloway wrote:

Do you have any record of spontaneous combustion coming about from dried
wood, subsequently rendered wet as he describes? Don't think it happens.

I'd rather not find out the hard way. Spontaneous combustion _can_ occur
with _dry_ wood but it takes a big pile. Get a little rot going and who
knows--that's pretty much the mechanism by which haystacks catch fire after
a rain. While spontaneous combustion is the topic of a certain amount of
research I don't think it can be described as a perfectly understood
phenomenon.


rhg


J. Clarke wrote:

Joe Emenaker wrote:


Okay, this is probably is going to strike most of you as a horrific
idea... but the more I thought about it, the more sense (or, at least,
the less nonsense) it made.

Back when I was making my own Biesemeyer clone
(http://joe.emenaker.com/Table-Saw%20...w%20Fence.html), I
was cutting a lot of angle-iron and steel tubing on my RAS fitted with
a metal-cutting wheel. Boy, did that thing make sparks like the
dickens! I thought it was going to ignite the sawdust which had
accumulated behind the RAS from earlier projects.

Well, I'm about to buy a DC and make my own cyclone for it. It struck
me that I'd be *asking* for trouble if I tried cutting metal with a DC
hooked up and running.

But what if I had a cyclone which emptied into a bin with a little
water in it? The water would catch all/most of those sparks. Not only
that, but it would be nice just for plain wood chips, since it would
help keep them under control when you detatch the bid to dump it
out... and it would help guard against some other DC-related fire
hazards (like hitting a nail or something).

So, I figured I'd ask: Does anybody out there *do* this?
Alternatively, has this been discussed before?


Now you end up with damp wood with an oxygen source. Can you say
"spontaneous combustion"?

- Joe



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--John
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