I had this hopper that I used to use for placing concrete with my skid steer. It has a slide gate at the bottom with a lever for dumping. After looking at the angled sides I thought this would work good for a charcoal maker so I revised it a little and made a quick stand for it and made a couple of batches of twig charcoal with it. Using twigs and small branches is a little more work up front but eliminates the dirty dusty work of grinding bigger chunks to size plus converting brush to charcoal doesn’t make me feel as bad wasting the heat. just a quick screening after the char is cooled overnight in an airtight barrel is all it takes to get engine sized charcoal. It averaged 9 gallons an hour of charcoal and about 2 gallons of biochar/ash after screening.



Very little smoke is produced with this tapered container. I could run this all day if I wanted to by dumping out of the bottom occasionally and shoveling the char into an airtight barrel. The one downside of this method is that I think to work properly it has to be continually fed a little at a time.