How about a useless Anthracite info thread

Anthracite is from the Greek Anthrax, meaning coal.

It takes Mother Earth about 250 million years to cook up a seam of Anthracite.

Anthracite is the carbon in drinking water filters.

Where else in the word can you find Anthracite besides the Appalachian Mountain range?

http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/mining ... p?secid=31

http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/anthra ... p?secid=31

Gary in PA, you're going to love this.

Pretty interesting stuff for a 'useless information' thread!!

Thanks for posting the links. Interesting reading.

Greg L

Read the whole darn thing,cannot sleep.very interesting. :sad5:

There is a ton of stuff here.

http://www.coalinfo.org/

coaledsweat wrote:Where else in the word can you find Anthracite besides the Appalachian Mountain range?

I'm still trying to find that word in Appalachian Mountain range.

Sorry I couldn't resist. Spellcheck didn't find that one...

I've read some of those articles briefly before, so I don't know if they answer this question but AFAIK anthracite is only found in a few places on the planet. The largest source right being right here. Other deposits include Alaska, Britain and China (I think). Regardless these are all small deposits compared to Northeastern Pennsylvania.

There's another good article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthracite

Your "leader" as Greg has referred to me... ... wrote a few paragraphs in that article. If you're unfamiliar with Wikipedia it's great source of information as anyone can edit it. Kind of like the forum here where anyone can post information but in an encyclopedic format.

Ya got me!

That's right about 90% of the world's Anthracite is right here in the Eastern USA.

And that is about an eleven hour drive on I-80 'too far east' for me! LOL.

Great information sites.

Anybody have old brochures showing old firebox, grate and stoker designs that could be scanned and posted?? I'm really interested in how the early engineers and inventors had tried to burn anthracite in the past.

Greg L

LsFarm wrote:Anybody have old brochures showing old firebox, grate and stoker designs that could be scanned and posted?? I'm really interested in how the early engineers and inventors had tried to burn anthracite in the past.

If you do search for Judge Jesse Fell you'll come across the original grate and design. The grate still exists somewhere I'm pretty sure but they tore the house down a few years back, nice house too.... it's parking lot or some damn thing like that. Unfortunate....

As far as stokers I'm pretty sure they didn't become popular until the 50's and 60's. Prior to that the smaller sizes were considered waste, many railroad beds in the area were created with rice and barley. Needless to say they too gdet tore up for the coal.

http://www.tccweb.org/penncoal.htm

I would have thought stokers were older than that, well I guess this place is better than coal college.

The Judge started out making nails it seems.

I don't have an exact date, my dates are when they would have become mainstream.

I've got a whole list of patents at home regarding coal stokers. Many of them go back into the 20's and earlier. My father had one at his home back in the 40's in Clarks Green, PA when he was a child.

Let me dig them up and I'll post them to the group here.

Chris

Residential stokers designs are certainly older than the mid 1940's. I recently received a copy of a Bureau of Mines Report on the Anthratube Stoker boiler published in January 1953. This is the boiler that is still sold by the original manufacturer Axeman-Anderson. The boiler was installed in a residence, instrumented and tested over a two year period, 1949 and 1950. Given typical product development design times I would guess it was first sold after the end of WW II. This is a modern stoker boiler design and it's over 50 years old! Surely much simpler designs that just push or drop coal into the firebox preceded it.

Yanche

europachris wrote:I've got a whole list of patents at home regarding coal stokers. Many of them go back into the 20's and earlier. My father had one at his home back in the 40's in Clarks Green, PA when he was a child.Let me dig them up and I'll post them to the group here.Chris

I would love to see them, I'm looking for info to "upgrade" my hand fired boiler

I don't know when stoves and boilers could be purchased with a stoker feed. But I do have a stoker unit that was sold in the '30s to be used to convert a hand fired unit to a stoker feed unit.

I'm in the process of adapting it to work in my boiler, so I can have 24+ hours of burn without feeding the fire.

I think EFM was making stoker boilers in the 30s.

Richard [our fearless leader ] What vintage is your VanWert boiler? Isn't it from the 40's ??

My 'IronFireman' stoker is supposed to be for bituminous coal. But it doesn't like my bituminous. So I'm cleaning it out and going to try Rice Anthracite next.

Greg L

A google search on Iron Fireman turns up: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -1,00.html
A 1936 Time Magazine article on the stoker company. Says it was incorporated in 1926.

Yanche