I’m familiar with the pine used in shipping pallets. Many years ago, when my high school included a bonfire as part of the homecoming celebration, we would get shipping pallets and crate wood from the Ford plant to serve as tinder.
Glad you liked it NKP guy! As I said, I read it years ago in “Outdoor Life” and never forgot it.
I imagine Lady Congreve never had access to cherry wood or I’m sure she would have mentioned it. Like you, I’m looking forward to autumn, I am NOT a hot weather person by any means. Thought I was going to melt this summer.
Great poem Firelock, glad you posted it. I used to have a backyard smoker, a Red Dragon made in Beaumont, Texas. Looked kind of like a steam locomotive with a horizontal, cylindrical cooking area and an offset wood chamber at one end and a stack at the other, each end had dampers to adjust the rate. I used strips of pine to get the fire going and then apple wood from my friend’s dead orchard. Sometimes I used cherry and a pork shoulder smoked for 8 hours on cherry wood is, hell I don’t have to tell you how good it was! I would also go down to the lumberyard trim shop where they had dumpsters full of oak. I would use that for heat, and the apple or cherry for flavour. Made it more economical of the smoking wood. I should never have sold that thing!
You’re making me hungry 54Light!
I saw one of those smokers a few years back. I thought about getting one myself, then hanging a bell on one end and installing a small boiler to supply steam for a whistle on the other, but passed on it in the end. I just didn’t need something that big.
One aspect of converting from wood to coal firing in locomotives has been overlooked. In the classic wood burning era locomotive’s fireboxes and flues were fashioned out of copper which was the best metal for conducting heat. Wood cinders and ash are soft so the copper stood up well. When coal was tried it was found that the resulting sharp cinders and fly ash cut into the copper and damaged the locomotives. Extensive use of coal required that locomotives be either retrofitted or built new with iron and/or steel fireboxes and flues. This delayed the changeover for a little while but the growing scarcity of wood was what drove the process, that and the fact that coal was a much more potent fuel.
There are two things about this that make me wonder, though:
In America, the use of copper inner boxes was increasingly discontinued in the latter wood-burning era. White observed
In Britain, a land renowned for coal-fired locomotives, the copper firebox survived on most designs right to the end of steam, being supplanted more for reasons of cost, increased working pressure, and weight reduction than anything (at least, anything I’ve read) involving critically increased wear.
Reading more carefully, it appears that the increased wear problem was due to anthracite firing … and looking at Sinclair’s history of the ‘locomotive engine’ will give some pretty good ideas where the failures in early anthracite firing were to be found. Soft coal was not as much of a problem, but I do note that Zerah Colburn noted most new American fireboxes to be iron just before the Civil War.
(In my personal opinion, improvements in American ironmaking likely reduced the problem with blistering and delamination of iron firebox sheets at some point by the end of the 1830s – fortunately we have an expert, in Rick Rowlands, in the history of ironmaking…)
So I think that the points made at the end, about scarcity of wood and higher available heat content from coals, are far more important and meaningful than the relative presence of copper in locomotive structure here.
Interestingly, anthracite firing was tried as early as the 1830’s / 1840’s, but was only effective in the vertical boilered “grasshopper” type locomotives.
As the “grasshopper” types were an evolutionary dead-end, and besides they weren’t too popular with the head-end crews, anthracite firing was dropped, not to surface again for nearly 50 years.
Thank You.