The history of this
project predates our time there, but when She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were at
Wheaton Labs as SEPPers in late September, there was a bit of discussion about making pitch glue and gathering ingredients.
My understanding is that High Commander Stephen had showed a
video to
Boot Chris about making pitch glue and so the experiment was born.
In essence, it comes down to two parts pitch, one part powdered charcoal, and one part organic material (herbivore dung is apparently ideal). Pitch had been gathered, and other opportunities for gathering occurred while we were there. Considering the
deer paths around, there was some opportunity to locate herbivore dung. There are occasional fires lit at Wheaton Labs, so char can be found at times.
Let the comedy ensue....
Our last afternoon there, Friday, September 27, the task finally bubbled up to a high
enough priority to get to work on it. It was a sunny and warm afternoon...some might say too warm to light a fire. Anyway, the ingredients were assembled and measured. First step is to melt the pitch, then mix in the solid ingredients. Sounds simple, right? What could possibly go wrong?
As we were effectively done, Chris noted it didn't look like he remembered in the video. It was more granular and thicker. While it was still warm, we did spread some on some
cardboard strips to provide evidence that we'd achieved a result.
Then Chris pulled up the video on his phone and we watched it (arguably this probably
should have been the first step). The demonstration showed measuring ingredients in their solid, unmolested form (we had crushed the dung and char before measuring, while the pitch was measured in chunks since we weren't set up to be able to measure the liquid form). This meant that we had more solid ingredients (char and poo) than liquid (pitch), which explains at least in part our thick grainy result. Next question is whether or not we may perhaps have been able to crush the char finer to get closer to a black dust. The video warned not to allow the pitch to burn - in our experiment, it had flamed a couple times while melting it, so we may have lost some volatile compounds of the pitch.
After watching the video, we did melt more pitch and combined it with the original. While it was still grainy, the consistency did thin out and it still worked on cardboard.
Lessons learned include measure twice, cut once (yet another reminder)...confirm the instructions and it could be valuable to ensure all the clowns involved...uh, I mean SEPPers...have been informed sufficiently to be able to follow the recipe. In hindsight, it may have been wise to attempt to make a smaller first batch. At least this would have left a bigger pile of raw ingredients available for a next attempt. We could have been a bit better prepared with cans and such to be able to measure and prepare the brew, but that's probably minor. Our fire may have been too big at the time we started melting - lower flames may have made it less likely to cause the pitch to light up.
Here's the video in question:
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