Today we're going to make about 30 pounds roughly of willow charcoal.
I thought I would start where the willow trees are.
This is a Florida willow, Salix floridus.
It's closely related to the black willow.
This is found all the way from Miami to Maine.
You see this type of tree.
Very abundant along the sides of the road.
Wherever there's water.
It's like an edge of a pond.
Like that.
You can see this.
Get real close in here.
See the types of leaves.
Like a spear pointed leaf.
The bark is very rough.
But like I was saying, they're very abundant.
They start off almost like leaves.
A brush, undergrowth.
And then several will get bigger and rise above the others.
They grow into a decent size tree.
35-40 feet.
People generally are looking for weeping willows.
Those are found in North Carolina.
There is a weeping willow down south here.
A very southern variety.
But it's kind of skimpy and scrawny.
Doesn't do very well.
But the luxurious beautiful big willows up north.
You can't really, unless you're lucky, get a hold of those.
They make excellent charcoal.
But they're very ornamental.
And people take a dim view of cutting them down.
But these swamp willows, as they're called.
They're like a nuisance tree.
No one reminds you of cutting them down.
And besides, it doesn't hurt them.
You cut them off at the ground.
So it doesn't harm them a bit.
Across the way, more willows.
I'll zoom in on it.
Something there.
And across the street.
Plenty of them.
It's kind of a low swampy area here.
But getting there, that's all willows.
It's almost like, like I said, like brush.
I'm going to go in the back in here and try to see if I can cut a small length of one.
So I'm going to go in there and see if I can, see if I can dig out a willow.
Okay, I was able to get one.
See it there.
I'm going to get a sprig of leaves so you'll have an idea what the leaves look like.
Tricky kind of backing out.
Well, I can do it.
It's kind of wet though.
We'll be back at the plant and we'll roast them off.
Now I want to show you how we strip the bark off of this.
These, by the way, are pallets used for fuel.
This time of year, sap is running good.
The bark comes off very easily, as you can see.
Now in September, we can dynamite it off.
Distance makes it a lot easier because if you had to work hard at stripping the bark, it would be a real pain.
So between like April to July, it comes off just about like this.
Just one piece a little tight here.
I'll get it.
Oops.
I'm going to have to cut it as simple as that.
It's a little bit too big of a piece there.
And that's it.
It's a willow log.
It's a small one, but it's a good size.
Anything up to about four inches is ideal.
We have a lot of papaya pit now, I guess.
We always put a platform down here.
I guess maybe this other one is a little better.
I'll put this other here.
I guess it'll burn away, but it starts off pretty good.
I'm going to get the stuff ready for that.
I'll just throw the wood in here.
Okay, now this wood has already been cut and split and dried.
I'll just throw it in there.
It takes about 100 pounds of wood.
You wind up with about 30 pounds of charcoal.
I'll bring it down a little bit.
It wants to pull up.
I'm putting that in there.
Two small pieces.
Okay, slide it down the cover.
I'm going to match my logs here.
Again, over here.
Put these on here like that.
These studs are a little bit too long.
It takes a little longer to wind them down.
Charcoal is a pretty amazing thing.
You can pyrolyze it down to just a black little half of the substance,
and then you powder and pulverize it.
Again, if you still look under a strong microscope,
you can still see the cellular structure of the wood.
That's why each charcoal is a characteristic of its own,
which makes certain charcoals more desirable.
You can see the pores and everything, even though it's finely powdered.
Ideally, the charcoal should be cooked at about 600 degrees for six hours.
But in an open pit like this, you don't have any control over temperature,
so that's the reason for splitting the wood so small that it pyrolyzes very quickly.
You don't have to hold it at a high temperature for a long time,
which destroys the charcoal and breaks down the structure.
It gets used to be like graphite, which is very unreactive.
It's about on there now.
I can't control the temperature, even with about 1,000 degrees,
the best I can do is keep it aflame a certain amount.
That's too much to hold for six hours, so this way in two hours it's all done.
It's all sealed up now and getting ready for the fire pit.
I'm going to lower this end of the pit.
It's pretty heavy.
I'm going to lower it down a little bit.
The cover doesn't fit that tight, it doesn't have to,
because while it's pyrolyzing and the volatiles are coming off the wood,
everything is coming out of the barrel, so there's no reason to have a real tight pit.
After it's finished, then you have to get it up on an end and pack dirt around it,
de-oxygen away, or give it a barrel of ash.
Now I'll prepare the fire and then we'll take another look.
There we go, it's all ready to go.
I'll touch it up.
It looks like rain, but when we start it, we've got to go with it.
It'll take a little while to get going.
That worked back in the air.
It should be all right.
I've got to cut off some more of these.
Rain might hold off, I don't know.
Anyway, what'll happen when it gets up around 600 degrees or 1,000 degrees or so,
a lot of smoke will start coming out around the rim of the barrel with the cover where I put on.
After about maybe 15 minutes after that, it'll catch fire and then it'll start to feed the flames.
The pyrolyzing process generates its own heat, so you need very little fuel after that.
Otherwise, you'd use three times as much fuel wood to keep it hot.
Once it gets going, it pretty well stays going.
You've got to keep a little fire to keep the heat up.
It'll just peter out if you don't.
We'll let that get blazing real good and then we'll come back and take a look at it.
That's starting to percolate now.
It's just beginning, though.
It gets pretty lively quickly.
When it burns down a little bit, I'll put some more wood on.
The main thing is to establish a nice bed of coals around it that maintains a good even heat.
About 1,000 degrees is too much, but for our purposes, it's all right.
Because we're not going to be pyrolyzing that long with the small pieces of wood.
Excuse me.
I've got the pallets cut up, as you can see.
That's about all I'll need once they're on the side of the pit.
The judge is the one to put those on, maintaining good, lively fire, but not roaring, blazing.
You can use up your wood too quick.
Because the pyrolyzing process follows its own pace.
At first, there'll be a lot of smoke coming out from around the rim of the barrel,
then really profuse smoke coming out.
Then suddenly it'll burst into flame, and then it'll start feeding back.
The barrel will be surrounded by bright yellow flames.
At that point, you cut back on your fuel. You don't need any more.
It'll just kind of feed itself itself. We'll have to smoke it a little bit before we do anything further.
It's really going good now.
We'll keep on cooking.
Charcoal is a very interesting thing.
As far as gunpowder goes, it's very critical for what type you use.
In fact, around 1899, 1900, DuPont came to this country.
They went hunting with a bunch of friends.
These were disgusted with the gunpowder because of the poor charcoal.
Apparently, they had a four-milling process.
They went back to France, gathered up some machinery and some old hands to do the business and come back here.
They saw the possibility of a lively market of gunpowder manufacturers.
That started the whole empire of the DuPont dynasty, which is well known today.
Willow is traditional in firework.
You said gunpowder, too, but maple is superior for black powder.
For small ash powder, it's a little quicker, more powerful.
But for large, poor art, it's like large cannons back in the 1800s.
Willow was a little better. Willow alder was good.
A little bit less grease pressure for me.
Not quite as quick a blast running.
In Britain, who made the finest powder in the world for a long time, fine ash small ash sporting powder,
was made with what they called dogwood, but it really wasn't true dogwood.
It was a ramness frangilla, which is alder buckthorn, kind of a low undergrowth type wood.
It was fine in Europe, I guess maybe in America, too.
I don't know where you can find it around here.
But it made a super gunpowder.
In fact, when they had an accident occasionally in the mills, they could tell it was dogwood charcoal
because the destruction would be more extensive.
The increased power of the powder is just super powerful.
Willow is great, like I said, it's not equal to dogwood.
And willow is fine for a general purpose all around.
Firework, very reactive, easy to work, easy to powder.
And more importantly, very easy to get because, like I said before, there's willow everywhere.
Anyplace that wetlands, there's over a hundred species of willow.
Swamp willow or flower, there's giant weeping willows up north.
It's a beautiful breed.
They're generally too big to give you too much charcoal, especially if you find smaller ones.
And like I said, they're very ornamental, so people just don't like you to cut them down.
But these swamp willows, like we have here, I suppose, stay to be glad to take them down.
But they're always worried about the overrunning water of wetlands.
And they have to, occasionally, they have to throw out some kind of a program
to eliminate rapid growth in the wetlands by soaking up a lot of water, blowing water through them.
It's a little bit hot here now.
You can see the volicals now around the rim of the barrel just starting to light up.
You can see the flames coming up around pretty soon.
You can see the bright orange look really bad.
It's a pretty good hot fire now, but it'll settle down in the coals and we'll keep it a little bit lower.
It's looking pretty good.
We'll put a little more wood on in a while and we'll take a look at it again when the volicals are starting to really cook.
Volicals now coming out in the form of a lot of smoke pouring out of the top around the rim.
They haven't lit up yet, but they're getting ready.
It's getting hotter and hotter.
It's really generating pretty good now.
We'll take it on here and poke some of the sticks around.
It's a bit of a firework.
That'll pretty much stay the way it is now for another half hour.
It'll start to really burn orange when that smoke will change into flame.
It'll do that for about a half an hour or so and then it'll start settling down.
By that time, it'll be almost ready to pour out of here.
It's really excellent charcoal doing it this way.
There's various processes.
In the olden days, particularly in Europe, they used to have what they called colliers.
In Italy, they called them carabari, carbonite, carbon people.
They'll have them like gypsies.
They go in the woods and they'll cut down, strip all the sapling trees, cut them down,
pile them up in a huge mound, several mounds, and cover them with earth and sod and whatever.
Then they'd light a little fire in the top of it and it would eat its way down.
They'd light it probably in several places, but they had to watch it constantly to make sure it didn't get away from it.
They had to kind of smold.
They'd watch the smoke.
They could tell by the color of the smoke.
For a time, the forest in Europe was getting pretty well depleted because they used charcoal for everything.
Cooking meals, smelting iron, steelmaking, all that.
Even though it was very limited in those days, that's all they had was charcoal.
Coal wasn't very popular.
It wasn't even hardly used at all.
Of course, today, charcoal is just strictly for cookouts and things like that and gunpowder.
But even gunpowder, black powder is kind of on the way out.
The only ones use it now are military, very limited for fused purposes.
Timing or transfer of fire from one place to another inside of a shell.
Timing.
It's still excellent for transferring flame, fire from one place to another.
You can't beat it.
It's been replaced by smokeless powder, which is a nitrocellulose base.
It's three times more powerful.
But it's more destructive than it seems to be with the military one.
Kill them faster, I guess.
But black powder, like I said, is relegated now to sporting use.
The company GOEX makes, they do a pretty lively business, I guess, with the black powder enthusiasts.
Muzzle loaders, they call them.
They still make excellent powder.
It's pretty much 1850 technology still, even today.
But the safety measures have been increased quite a bit, improved.
They're always striving for that.
But the basic method of making black powder is about the same as it was.
Big millstone, edge runners.
And they mill it, moisten it, mill it, and then they press it, granulate it, sieve it, polish it.
Whole bunch of stuff.
But it comes out to black powder, commercial black powder.
And this is where it all begins.
A charcoal, potassium nitrate is pretty cut and dried.
It's either pure or it isn't pure.
There's no difference.
A charcoal is an extremely different type of wood.
Like oak or pine, you can't make good gunpowder at all.
It burns half as fast as, let's say, maple.
Maple just burns in a flash, just like flash powder.
And this is what you need.
It has a lot of power, a lot of gases involved from it.
You can see that the volicals are lit up now.
The whole thing is blazed.
So I've cut the wood way back now.
We don't need much more wood.
You can see down the bottom of the barrel, the flame is roaring out of there like a jet engine.
I can hear it.
You probably can't hear it on the camera here, but I can hear it.
It's kind of a roaring noise.
The whole top is open pretty much.
It's not very tight.
If I had a hole, say a three-inch diameter hole, the flame would be coming out of there four feet long.
It's roaring out of there, but that would be kind of wasting the heat because it would just go out into space.
This way, it's sucked back under the barrel by the convection currents.
The heat going in the fireplace and up just pulls that flame right back, as you can see.
So we won't need much wood now.
It'll just stay about like this for another half an hour.
At that point, we'll take a look at it again.
They're extremely bright now, as you can see.
They're in a bright yellow.
I don't know at what point what kind of gases are coming out in the form of molecules,
but I know if you collect these gases through a series of ductwork, it makes like a pitch or a tar.
They used to use that for sealing boat seams and things like that.
It's waterproof, very sticky.
Of course, they don't bother with that now.
That's one of the ways they make distillates from usually pinewood,
turpentines and all the different things that come from that.
This is just going off into the air.
You just want to get rid of them.
What's left is the carbon structure of the charcoal.
It's going very nicely now.
It's really percolating.
It's a little hot, too. I can feel the heat back here.
It'll settle down pretty soon.
I see the wood has pretty well died down.
I don't know if I'll put any more.
I don't think I will put any more, maybe a few more pieces.
Not too much more now.
Now the wood's just about burned out now.
You can see the volatile gases are still burning around the rim.
They've just settled down quite a bit.
They're not so fierce as they were.
It's been an hour and a half now.
There's a process.
So about another half hour.
We should be taking it out.
I've used up all the pallets, as you can see, except the one that I had there.
Maybe I'll put a couple more sticks just to make sure it keeps going a little.
In about maybe 25 minutes, you'll be ready to pull it out.
As you can see, the volatile's just about done.
The flame has almost colored us now.
You can still see a little bit of flickering orange there, but not much.
It's about ready to pull out of there and set up on in.
It might cook.
Right now it's blazing hot, so be careful not to fall against it or something if you seriously burn.
Right now we've got to get that in.
Now, shovel.
There's a pack of dirt around it, all the way around, no gap.
It's a little bit of work, not much.
It's pretty safe now, isn't it?
Now, let it sit for about six hours, cool off.
It's fairly cold.
If you just open it too soon, it could reignite and you'd have to douse the charcoal with water, and that's not good.
Then it takes forever to dry it out.
It's best just to do it right.
Also, by the way, when you do this at home, you could use any kind of a small cookout fireplace, something like that.
But you've got to use a few brains.
There's always a fire hazard, you know, careful.
But it can be done on a smaller scale, maybe, or whatever.
Six hours will open it up.
It's a lot lighter than it was.
Now, let's see what we've got.
Charcoal is a very interesting substance in this deactivated kind.
They just take charcoal powder, heat it to a red-hot temperature, and then blow high pressure steam into it.
It cleans and enlarges the pores.
It has tremendous absorptive quality, not absorptive, adsorptive.
Charcoal will absorb water the same way a sponge or paper towel will.
The adsorption property picks up odors, gases, poisons.
A tremendous cleaning agent for small molecular things.
One of the uses I had years ago was I used to take charcoal powder and clean everything from your breath to your insides.
They had activated charcoal gum.
Apparently, it wasn't that important because it ceased to exist.
I haven't seen it lately.
Anyway, we'll get this cover off and see what we've got.
I already know what we're going to have, but let's take a look at it.
Last one.
Lock it up.
Put all this stuff over here.
Oh yeah.
You can see it in the light shining.
See that?
Very nice, like velvet. Nice velvet texture.
Mild eyes. Yep, very nice.
Might have been over against the other side.
See how it starts to get hot? It must have been a real hot location in the barrel.
It starts to get real tough.
You're supposed to be like this.
Break very easy.
See, it's got a nice velvet look to it.
It breaks very easily.
Now, I'll show you the mill where I reduce it to a fine powder.
This is an old cement mixer made into a ball mill.
There are all kinds of ball mills here.
This is where I mill the charcoal.
This is the stuff we saw outside here.
Put it in there.
It's kind of messy at this stage.
As you can see.
I have to be very careful.
Slowly pop it in the other one.
Flow and water.
Now, smoke.
Got to see that.
Take it outside.
You can get a little better idea.
About 15-20 pounds.
Get something to smoke.
Beautiful stuff.
That's the story of charcoal.
We made about 30 pounds this morning, I'd say.
It was a little trouble, but not that much.
A little messy, but not that much.
That's a half inch right here.
Here's the mix, 10 pounds of a pale green star comp.
Made with barium nitrate.
It's not a brilliant green.
You need barium chloride for that.
I don't like to use that too much.
Anyway, I got 10 ounces of water here.
A little bit of alcohol added.
I probably won't use all this water,
but I just have it here anyway.
I just go by how it feels.
It's got to be pretty critical on the moisture
if you're going to use star plates,
because it has to be granular, free-flowing,
so it goes through the holes.
Let's see, I'll add a little bit of this water.
Mix it in.
A lot of aluminum in this too, so I hope it don't heat up.
If it does, we'll just spread it out, get rid of the heat.
It seems to gobble up this moisture pretty good.
Maybe I'll need even more.
At any rate, it's going to feel a certain way.
Pretty dusty right now.
Yeah, it stopped working.
Yeah, it's just getting a little better.
I'll need more moisture now.
I've used it all already.
Some mixes vary.
Some of it takes a lot less.
Fictions with a lot of charcoal take more, generally,
because the charcoal absorbs it quite a bit.
This is getting better now.
Of course, we've got to run it through a sieve anyway.
It kind of dissipates the moisture,
but it helps throughout the mix.
It's getting better.
We'll see how it goes.
Yeah, it's getting about good now.
See, when you squeeze it, it stays together in a lump.
You definitely don't want it too wet.
If you get it too wet, then you can't do anything with it.
It'll stay on the light side and go gradually.
In fact, I usually have a mixer around that I finish up with.
Yeah, we'll just leave it here.
Just add a little bit of that.
That way, you're not getting a whole lot.
Running it through the sieve is going to fix it up, too,
because all these little balls, little lumps here,
contain a lot of moisture.
You've got to spread that out for the rest of it.
Okay, we're about ready to run it through a sieve.
We need that mesh sieve.
Some guys use a pointy mesh, something like that.
This here works good. It's very easy to run it through.
I'm not really trying to...
The cotton is already mixed.
I'm just trying to distribute the moisture,
so I'm not really worried about the mesh size too much.
I'm going to run it through here. It goes through very easily.
Come on, just here.
Yeah, it's getting pretty good.
A little more in here.
It doesn't look like 10 pounds, because barium nitrate is very heavy.
Extremely dense.
I don't know the specific gravity, but it's something like 2 something.
I don't know what it is, really.
All I know is, you use that.
A little bit weighs a lot.
There's no danger from this.
It's difficult to light, in fact.
You have to prime it real good, these stars.
It's kind of a fresh spot here.
I'll just hold it up.
You can probably see it falling through there.
Rubber gloves are good too, because even though it's a very remote possibility,
scratching your fingernails on the screen,
screening sensitive compositions with potassium chloride, something like that,
here's a real extremely slight chance it could get set off.
I don't want to hold my breath waiting for it, but I've got to be safe and sorry.
So rubber gloves, you don't have that problem.
That's it.
That's how we're going to start it away.
I'll keep that in my pocket.
Better start off by not making a mess, because I usually wind up with work.
It's a lot heavier than it looks, I'll tell you.
Okay, now it's in the bucket.
I'm going to put a cover on here to keep the moisture from getting lost.
I like to keep checking it for heat, so we can tell.
Occasionally it will warm up a little.
It's been cool.
Okay, now I'm going to have to get a scoop.
We've got this over here.
Here's the 3 1⁄8 plate.
It's the one 3⁄4 thick.
About a foot by 10 inches is the compactor.
The notch cut on the sides, so you match that up.
It's very simple.
Just take a scoop of the mix, top it on here, just quickly spread it right in.
Like that.
This plate makes 400 stars, by the way, at all times.
And it goes pretty quickly for that many stars.
I hate to cut 400 of these in that one, then there's the time.
I hate to do it, because you have to put it in the mold and pound it and then intensify it.
Which I have to do with this too, but it's a lot easier on this thing here.
Instead of the whole one, I can't get too close to it because it will rock it.
Then the next one, then the next one, then the next one.
Right, let's check up the plate.
I'm going to clean it off a little bit.
There's the receiver over here, just out of the way.
Just put this over here.
Just put that in there so we can have something to put the stars on.
Set it in here like that.
That's the first punch.
Oops, rolling off.
Second punch.
Third punch.
Fourth punch.
400 stars.
I'm going to roll.
I'm going to do a little cap on that.
You've got a very carefully picked them up, set them somewhere.
I see a couple of broke when you get that.
Put this back here.
Roll scoops at once so it will be all day.
Work it in.
We can work it in with anything.
I like to use my hands even though it's a mess.
But still, hands are a lot more sensitive.
Easy to do.
Try to put it over a spatula or something.
The first type of star plates I used to make, that was the principle of my idea.
It would be something like this, but it would be set on spaces with pegs underneath.
A certain distance down.
So you just wipe it in with a spatula.
Then the stars will automatically get a certain length that way.
That's kind of tedious.
This way it's a lot faster and easier.
More to come.
So, I think I'll get to use a little bit.
Now, put this back inside.
What about all the things in here?
Put the plate on here.
Pick up the excess.
That's not getting hot, is it?
No.
Most of the metal fuels I use, I spray them with a tumbler.
I spray them with that Thompson's water seal spray bottle.
That kind of coats it and stops the reactivity.
Try to be a little gentle pushing these out so they don't smack down on the board.
You can do it anyway if you can't help it.
That's 800.
A couple more broke.
Somehow they're moving when I'm pushing them out.
I think I'll tap this down a little bit when I do it.
If they roll together, one is on top of the other, then they break.
You've got to stay absolutely where they are, where it's supposed to be.
So, over here.
A couple more scoops of this stuff.
I tried three scoops last time, I'll try three again.
That seems to be enough.
That's all I've got to fill the bill with.
Okay, I need this one here, quickly.
You can get quite a lot out of this.
Let's do another scoop of this.
Now, you've got to kind of wipe it around a little bit so it settles.
But you don't have to worry about it too much because it gets all over you.
Now, a compact there.
Okay, that's that.
Let me pack off a little bit.
Over here, this time I'm going to pick up the stuff first.
Takes a second to get it up.
Now, I'm going to put this over in front of where I can do something.
The stars really can't move.
You've got to drop straight down, stay right where they are.
But wiggle them around.
One will roll, you know, the other one doesn't down yet.
If this gets too crushed up, it'll push the compact down a notch.
That one broke.
You've got to just nice little rows in the front.
Okay, so, sometimes I have to get these inserted here and you've got no way to get the stars out.
Let's do this quite quick.
I'm more careful to do this the better.
Like I said, the stars, they drop right straight down, they just sit there in little rows, nice as you please.
If you get wiggling it all around, yeah, see, all around.
Every one, that one broke.
It's all up to you how carefully you press that thing down.
Same principle, same thing, basically.
Small plate, because you can't make as many stars because, not a simple reason, the pressure on each star is a lot less.
So, you've got to make them bigger stars.
I haven't used this one for quite a while, I'm not sure how much.
A little bit of heat in that now.
Not going to speak up, though.
If it's going down so much, it's not building up, it's just a vagueness that's formed.
But you don't want to get heat because it spoils the mix, the effect.
It's more unreactive.
Whenever it reacts like that and you smell ammonia or something, you know the nitrite's in your room and you're rolling.
It just makes it so it doesn't sparkle as much.
Okay, there's a compact there.
A little more on this one because...
This one makes...
9 times...
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 180, 189.
Which is probably a bit of a half-inch size.
We'll use a small cup, of course.
Keep this open in front of us.
Same thing applies here, you have to be a little bit careful pushing around.
Very careful in.
You let go all of a sudden of this particular composition.
Others don't seem to do that so much.
There's no friction at all using this boom right now.
That didn't work out either.
Oh, I wondered what I think.
That's what happens.
Don't forget to do that.
That's one of the things you forget very easily.
And it's one of the most important things.
You just can't forget it.
I don't know how I've done it alone, just out of...
Just work it right in here.
Very cramped space here.
I don't normally be on the porch.
I don't live here as you can probably guess.
It's just a firework hobby building.
I'm going to be on the porch.
The only trouble out here is the noise of traffic going by.
That's not so good.
There's a lot of room up here.
I can really move around.
It's always a place to put stuff.
Okay, let's see if we have success this time.
There's some terrible weather on it, I can't believe it.
I don't know where it's supposed to go.
It's really crazy.
Come on.
Yesterday I made a dirty pile of charcoal.
It was nice.
It wasn't as good as it could have been.
It rained a lot all day.
Okay, we'll put this back.
Hover it up.
Put this over here.
Come out of there like a saw.
What do you call it?
A little bit of air flow.
I'll set this one up here.
All right, now we're ready to dry these tires.
Here they are, the ones we made the other day.
They're all good and dry now.
Let's dump them in here.
Spray them a little bit.
There's the meal powder.
Let's put it in there.
Let that work for a little while.
Hold the stars real good.
Put this back over here.
You don't want to let them run too long.
They have to get shiny.
You don't want a real rough finish on them.
Straight through here.
Beautiful shiny in this car.
Okay, that's about enough.
I'll take them out of there.
There's the stars out in the sun to dry.
You can see there, they were almost a silvery color.
Now they're coated with powder.
It's a lot blacker.
You can even coat them more than that, but that'll get them started.
Unless you break them so hard that you need half an inch of primer.
But it's quite simple.
It took about maybe 10 minutes at that total.
So that's the story of star plates and how easy they are to use.
See you next time.