I rinsed the clinkers to get a better look at them. The picture with the spray nozzle is for size comparison. What's interesting is the texture reminds me of pumice, and parts of it have minerals that you would see inside a geode, or the surface of a cave stalactite. There's also bits of charred wood embedded inside these clumps. I didn't scale the pics down much so they can be zoomed into.
Send me your address & the next time I have them in the stove I’ll send you some. Or maybe someone could send you some for next years Secret Santa gift.
I have burned a lot of dead elm and sometimes I get clinkers sometimes not. I think it depends on what the ground is like where the tree is growing and that elm has a tendency to pick up a lot of minerals from the soil and hold it. No big deal.
I cut only dead standing elm. I get tons of clinkers, mostly from elm, but box elder and some others too, just nothing like elm. They are minerals that concentrate in the wood. Some trees are just better than others at sucking them up. Some soils have a lot more minerals in them. I had a whole shelf of a clinker in my stove the other day from 1 elm split that was 4x5" and 17" long. That was the only piece of elm I burned in a while and it made a lot of clinker.
It amazes me the minerals are apparently drawn up from the ground. As a lot of the country is, we have a lot of limestone around here, rich in calcite. Which is the mineral predominate in limestone caves systems, and I believe is the mineral in the clinkers of this post. I wonder if the mineral composition of clinkers from elm trees growing in other types of soil is different. Now I'm going to stay up all night wondering about it...
That is quite the collection of quotes concerning elm you have there Wood Wolverine. Cracked me up. Now we can add clinkers to the list.
Heck, whenever I load a page that you have posts on it already makes my screen dim a bit from all the power/data draw!
