Homemade chunk charcoal - a documentation of failure

On a completely unexpected whim, I decided to attempt to make chunk charcoal. Now, I did some research on this before hand. Not much though, as I've seen this done using roughly this method. I want to preface this entire post by saying that this was by all accounts a failure, but I felt it worth documenting, as I find I learn as much from failures as I do from successes.

My basic plan was to fill a steel drum with small chunks of wood, place it above a hot fire and then close it up leaving only minimal venting to prevent a bad bad case of explosion.The idea is that the heat will vaporize off all the volatile gasses and leave only solid carbon behind. That's the plan anyway. It can work, I just got sloppy.

So, step one is to cut up a bunch of wood. Check.
Step two, fill the barrel. Check.
Step three, build a nice hot fire, Check.

This is where the pictures come in.

This is immediately after setting the barrel on the fire. I let it get good and hot to dry out the wood in the barrel. Very little smoke, mostly steam came out of the barrel for the first 20 minutes. When I started seeing actual smoke coming out, I closed up the lid.

The lid on this barrel is just a square cut out and hinged with some tie wire. I set that closed, laid tinfoil over the top to cover the gaps in the lid, and then piled it full of dirt on top to act as weight. This closed the top up nicely, with only two vent holes.

I let this cook for about 3 hours and then took a peek. There was essentially no change to the wood inside, even though it was venting air at about 300 degrees. I decided that it just needed to either be hotter, or cook longer to remove any remaining moisture. I could feel the smoke still had a lot of steam in it, which is what led me to try the second option.

 

I rebuilt the fire with about enough to burn for an hour or so, and then went in the house. When I checked it before bedtime, the fire was burned almost all the way down and the top of the barrel was cooling. I figured that it was probably undercooked, but didn't want to overdo it so I left it to finish burning down as it was mostly just loose cool coals at this point.

The next day, much to my surprise, the barrel was full of ash.Completely burned down.

So, what I learned from this:
The wood has to be DRY DRY DRY.
Temperature control is difficult at best
Duration is hard to judge unless your barrel has a window.

There are other methods to make charcoal, but this one is easy for me so I'm going to try it again.

Things I'm going to do differently.

I'll use only wood that has dried in the sun for several weeks. Any wood that is recently felled or green will be saved for a later batch.
I'll pay more attention to the heat of the fire, I'm sure it got too hot towards the end when the moisture had steamed off.
I'll use a lid that allows me to check the state of the charcoal more easily, so that I can monitor more closely.
Less heat
Less time

And hopefully, I'll have something that more closely resembles charcoal than ash.

Any and all constructive input is welcome, especially if you've made charcoal before.