Yeah, I had thought of the coal chute door too. I figured it would be easier to fab up a wood door than to find a coal door though.
There is a shared block wall between the basement and the garage. The garage floor is about 2' below the sill plate. In other words, once the hole is cut and I'm standing in the basement looking through the chute hole, I will be looking right at the cars tires. My plan was to make a 16"x16" hole, just not sure if I want to take out the block directly under the sill plate or go down one and have the bottom of the hole right down at the garage floor. The plan is to make a nice wood door for the inside and the outside too, maybe have some rigid foam insulation on the inside of both doors. Then I need to come up with some sort of heavy duty rolling cart (the wood gobbler is at the other end of a long ranch house) to build a box on, that will be placed in the basement directly under the hole. I'm sure it will need to be somewhat overbuilt to take having chunks dropped on it from 6' or so above. A slide, pipe or some other inexpensive means of controlling/guiding the wood into the box and not all over the floor is in the plans too.