To start with, I "borrowed" a couple of Youngblood's round bottomed, cast iron pots. (In my defense, they were as rusty as my pool skills and needed to be re-seasoned anyways.)
I dug a pit and readied the bottom pot by putting about a half cup of water in it.
I made a wire rack from some scrap left over from another project. Next, I fashioned a wire "basket" of an even finer mesh that I bummed off Youngblood. All of the bones from the pig feet were placed in the wire basket and that was in turn was set upon the grate.
The top pot was put in position.
The seam between the two pots was then sealed with clay I had the kids fetch from the stream.
I buried the whole contraption in the ground, piled dirt up around it to make sure that all of the clay was well covered then poured several gallons of water around the edge of the hole to settle the dirt in (Sepp did this in a video. I've no idea if its necessary but since he did it, I did it.)
A fire was built out of some old, manky fire wood.
Having gotten this far in the process, I can already pass along one improvement that could be made: the wire grate should be larger that the diameter of the pots by about two inches. The excess wire would serve the same purpose as using rebar when pouring concrete.
I have a timer set for two hours to let me know the minimum time to keep the fire burning. After the timer goes off, I plan to let the fire go out on its own. The whole set-up will be left in situ over night.
Tomorrow, when I dig it up, I'll relate the results (or perhaps delete this thread and pretend the whole thing never happened;).
To think that something would work that long and not wash off or loose its potency was just hard to believe. But he swears by it, so I am glad that someone actually tried it to see how it works. Keep us posted how the whole process goes, and what the finished product smells like.
