by mannytheseacow » Mon Mar 18, 2013 1:16 am
I put together one of these cast cores over the weekend. I scaled it down to a 6" and built the inner mold of the J-tube from OSB. I cast it yesterday and let it sit inside over night, then I strapped it to a 2-wheel dolly and slid it outside this morning. Nothing special, just a cast block. I did hollow a small area (5" x 1" deep) under the feed tube for an ash catch, and I lined the inlet to the feed tube with orange clay bricks.
Fired it up this morning and she was a rockin!!! Once the clay started to harden around the stove pipe exhaust and the J-tube burned out the exhaust leaked a little and the performance went down. Starting to get a feel for how the wood burns and what size pieces to use. I was a little worried about the 6" system but after using it I cant imagine that having an 8" feed chamber would be much better.
She's been cooking all day. It's got some significant cracks, a bit more than in Matt's video. I used the masonry cement with the perlite and fireclay.... I'm not too worried though. Or should I be? I think it will be ok. About half-way through I was wondering if I should have put some rebar or something in it, but too late now.
I'm going on about 12 hours of constant burning but I'm about to let it go and go to bed. One thing I'm worried about is that we're still seeing some some low temperatures here, and I hope it doesn't freeze and break. I'm guessing there's still a good amount of water in it. We're seeing highs of around 32* and lows of 10-12*. Oops, should have thought of that before. So I figure I've got about $60 in this core right now. I guess if it does fail from freezing it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I'd rather not make it again.
Anyway, thanks again for everyone that posts on here! It was so easy to put this core together after reading all the posts on this site. I'm going to include some pictures of my own at some point here~
"Knowledge is power. Arm yourself."