by colin saengdara » Wed Jan 01, 2014 6:44 pm
Devil, I haven't posted and most of my cookers are lost to the sands of time. I had been a lone experimenter for years and just made em', used em', realized they could be better, and took em' apart to reuse my materials. I started out after seeing a youtube video and I got hooked right away. I made my first stoves with stove pipe and old 5 gallon paint containers. I configured them every which way and learned a lot about what burned well and what didn't. But of course, when something burned very well, it didn't last very long. Later, I found a source for used fire brick, and I started stacking. This was a much better material. Safe, long lasting, and although it was slow to really heat up, once hot, it stayed hot for a long time. It was soon after this that I finally checked out the permies.com website and found a whole new world of other people interested in rocket stoves and sustainability in general. I "met" Matt over there on the permies site and then checked out his videos and was very impressed and inspired by his attitude, his designs, and his ability to share what he's doing for others. One of the things he's inspired me to do is to join the conversation. I still only post infrequently. My tendency, as I'm sure you've noticed, is to give lots of information that I think will be useful. It's just easier for me to try to anticipate the next logical questions and offer up the answers, than to carry on conversations that I might not be able to respond to given my time constraints. After all, I do have to process wood about every 2 or 3 days to stay ahead of the weather here.
Looking outside now, I'm trying to see if I've still got an example of one of those primary air in front types... It's not set up. The surrounding masonry is still there, the stove was made from 8 inch stovepipe. 1 tee, 1 90 opened to about 45 degrees for the feed, 1 8 inch end cap to cover the feed, another 90 to turn the gases upward into the heat riser, and a heat riser made from an 8" x 24" stovepipe wrapped with 1"kaowool squeezed into a10" diameter shell made from an old chicken feeder. I still use the riser for almost every impromptu build. even for an open barbecue, it takes the smoke right out of your face and drafts it up the tube. Pretty neat really! The inner tube is mostly gone from the heat now, but the concept worked pretty well for a movable heat riser. I'm pretty sure that the stove core is sitting on my pile of stove parts, but that's under the snow right now. I mostly used this for outdoor winter instant heat, cooking in the summer sometimes, and occasionally just for the heck of it. I'll take some pictures of what I've got laying around.
This is the heat riser:
This is the inside showing the deterioration of the inner pipe and the kaowool interior insulation:
If you want me to I probably have enough materials onhand to show you exactly how I set up the 8 inch top feed. But like I posted earlier. I don't suggest you build it this way. If you are dead set on doing it, and you want it to be a permanent stove, then I will be happy to assist you in the design so you can at least avoid some problems that I have already experienced.
-Colin