Found a few nice things in the most unlikely place

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Sunday afternoon, I was helping my friend at the funeral home he runs. We did some repairs and other things, and he was pulling out all sorts of neat little things, like 3" round thick brass plates with rare earth magnetic backs that go inside caskets, cool coffin hardware items, neat containers and boxes, and such. I always take these things and find uses in the shop ... or for some Steampunk project.

One new thing he showed me was a new type casket called barn-wood. It is re-purposed Appalachian wood from old barns and other wooden clad buildings. The wood is cleaned up and the back is planed to about 1/2" thick, leaving the front side the natural weathered wood look. It is still full of holes from insects, termites, rot, etc. The wood is then backed with a 1/4" veneer if solid wood. These 6" wide planks are then made into a vintage looking coffin, or a more contemporary dome top casket. The effect is pretty neat.

You may remember that a couple years back he gave me 20 sacks of Cast-O-Lite 30 for free after the old crematorium was relined and renovated.

We were out in the crematorium building, putting tools away, and he pulled out a drawer with the three things pictured below in it. They were spare parts for the old burner system. The new burner had different parts, so these would normally be trown out, but he keeps the cool stuff for me.
The long thin spark plug device, and the shorter one are igniters. Hook them up to a spark coil and they will light the burner. The bigger device is a fantastic thermocouple. It has an outer ceramic sheath, and the unit fits in a 3/4" pipe thread collar. The head has a ceramic TC block. The probe and sheath are currently 18" long, but can easily be shortened to any needed length.

 

[T. Erdelyi]

Cool stuff, I always like helpin' my friends especially cleanin' up and clearin' out buildings. I'm from a family of collectors and that's how we get a lot of stuff. Friends are always pointin' me in the direction of odd stuff they've found or know about I'd like, tools and equipment are always a favorite. Even better when you can use or re-purpose it for some other use. What is it they say? One man's garbage is another man's treasure?

Funeral parlors always have the coolest stuff, especially the older ones. We had a family friend growin' up who had a family in the business and because of that I was never weirded out by those kinda places.

 

[Randy3000]

What temp and soak time for a body? Not to sound morbid, just curious if it actually is in the realm of steel working temps.

 

[Brian Ayres]

What temp and soak time for a body? Not to sound morbid, just curious if it actually is in the realm of steel working temps.

My customer who has a pet cremation company doesn’t burn anything anymore. They “melt” the bodies on a rack in a giant “dishwasher” filled with lye that runs for about 23 hours. The remaining bones are dried, ground and returned for the “ash”...

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

I will have to ask my friend, but I suspect it is around 1600-1800F and for several hours. I also suspect it ramps up as it goes. The body first dries, then burns, then the hot carbon combines with hot air and turns into CO2 at 1350F. The rest is predominantly calcium oxide and such, which has been reduced to ash .... and any metal there was. No metal is melted, just black from heat. The ash and bone chunks are put in a big blender machine and pulverized to a finer mix that resembles coarse beach sand. It is gray with black specks.
There is an "afterburner" in the vent stack that burns the exhaust so nothing comes out but hot gasses. You would think it would smoke, but it doesn't. The long rod igniter goes in the stack to ignite that burner.

 

[Drew Riley]

Very cool. I work maintenance at an industrial laundry, and we have some Challenge dryers from around the 70's or so that use similar igniters and TC's or "flame rods" as they are often called. You can still get them from a handful of distributors, but some of those kinds of things are getting harder and harder to source in specific sizes or configurations.