Hi Dave and All, You were lucky with the Daw Mill, if it came in large lumps as it must have been screened. I've had that stuff so bad that it would not burn even on automatic stokers in commercial boilers because as soon as it got into the worm feed it crushed to a dust and jammed it up . In the old days it used to come only from Daw Mill colliery which was a very bright shiney coal,but these days it is what they call a blend and the mix varies a hell of a lot. The main problem is, it tends to be very soft, falls to bits and produces tons of dust.These days there are almost no deep mines any more which produce the hard decent coal and it all comes from opencast mines which only produce crud suitable for blowing into Power Station boilers . I have seen locos trying to run on it and the main thing that it seemed to produce was smoke.The photographers love it,but it's hard work for the poor Fireman. Just as a tail end, years ago I did visit a real deep coal mine which entailed crawling along a Coal face 3 foot high which had hydraulic pit props every 3 feet and was 600 feet long,I did the full length. Thats another story. Regards Clif ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Beaman" <davebeaman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <modeleng@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 11:22 PM Subject: [modeleng] Re: Clinker > MODEL ENGINEERING DISCUSSION LIST. To UNSUBSCRIBE from this list, send a blank email to, modeleng-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line.