JohnnyMX
Gold Member
We have tons of bonfires and they usually involve pallets which means a ton of ash and nails in the fire pit. I wanted to try this and see if I could keep the ash as long as it wasn't much effort to remove the nails. The fire ring is built for standard pallets to help contain the mess. I built the whole thing with stuff I had from pallets and an old garage door torsion tube. I did have to buy a piece of 1/4" hardware cloth for the screen.
You basically shovel, shake, remove nails with a magnetic wand, and put the charcoal back in the pit. The next process was taking shovels of ash and passing the shovel under my magnetic floor sweeper as a final check for any rogue nails. The nails fly up and stick to the rake right through the ash. The magnets I have just from working with metal in the shop. Doubling and offsetting the screen may reduce the amount that made it through the first sift, but I would probably want second pass anyway just to be sure. I already run the rake around the pit to try and keep any stray nails out of the path of feet and did that when done in case anything fell off when going from pit to sifter.
I ended up with two tubs of clean ash and about 35+lbs of nails. This was a very easy process and didn't take too much time to do.
I made the frame to fit the RTV so it would slide forward/backward but not move much side to side. The tube works really well when sifting as the sifting box slides very easily and nothing gets caught on the round bar.
You basically shovel, shake, remove nails with a magnetic wand, and put the charcoal back in the pit. The next process was taking shovels of ash and passing the shovel under my magnetic floor sweeper as a final check for any rogue nails. The nails fly up and stick to the rake right through the ash. The magnets I have just from working with metal in the shop. Doubling and offsetting the screen may reduce the amount that made it through the first sift, but I would probably want second pass anyway just to be sure. I already run the rake around the pit to try and keep any stray nails out of the path of feet and did that when done in case anything fell off when going from pit to sifter.
I ended up with two tubs of clean ash and about 35+lbs of nails. This was a very easy process and didn't take too much time to do.
I made the frame to fit the RTV so it would slide forward/backward but not move much side to side. The tube works really well when sifting as the sifting box slides very easily and nothing gets caught on the round bar.