Gassy Wood

So we showed you how to make an alcohol stove, but what if you don't have any alcohol? What if all you have is a 10-foot tall pile of small bits of wood? What do you do then, smart guy?

If you've been reading this blog, what you do then is produce your homemade woodgas stove from your backpack and get to business. Here's how to make one.

We got the ideas from here, and followed it as closely as we could: Make Your Own Woodgas Stove

First, cans:

The one on the right is an empty paint can, available for purchase from most any hardware or paint store. I got this one at Lowe's for $3, but later found a much better price on them at Guiry's for $1.40 apiece, so I'll be going there from now on. The can on the left should be (according to the instructions we followed) a one-pint paint can. We can't find a one pint paint can for anything other than a ridiculous price. So we have a 20 oz pineapple can. Exact same diameter (3 3/8") as a pint can, but about half an inch taller. I'm going to keep looking and see if I can find a can that will match the one-pint can more exactly, but this one worked well enough. Here's what it was before:

This stuff is delicious. I would rather eat this and use the can in good conscience than spent $8 on rubber cement in a 1-pint can that I have to pour out. We are going to keep experimenting with different cans, and I'll let you know if I find anything better.

First thing you do is to take the bottom off the can with a safety can opener. This isn't one of those, which is why it isn't working. Don't skimp. Get the real safety can opener. ours cost $8 and it worked astonishingly well. Left a smooth surface on both sides of the cut and actually allows you to use the lid as a lid again if you want. I don't know how it works, but my money is on magic.

There we go. Much better. You'll see the ugly scars on the can from the first attempt. We had to go buy more cans after I screwed up the one I'd gotten originally.

Yet another failed attempt at doing something. We drilled a hole in the can and tried to use a holesaw to cut out the bottom of the can, leaving a narrow strip around. It didn't work. It made awful noises very effectively, but not much else.

This worked much better. I have a ton of tin snips at my house from various previous projects (trying to find the style that would let me cut through 18-ga stainless without my hand cramping up. I'm still looking.) and they worked like a charm. Just cut along one of the ridges and then sanded it a touch to smooth it out.

There we go. Now there's enough of a ledge in there so the wire mesh can sit on top. You'll see what I'm talking about soon.

Here's the new paint can with the bottom cut off with the appropriate tool. It was much easier and looks so much prettier.

Okay, this is what I was talking about. Get some wire mesh (I had some laying around the garage. Tell me you're surprised.) and cut it to size so it will fit into the opening of the can. You should use some JB weld to stick this down. We didn't and after the first burn, it had changed shape enough to just rattle around in there now.

Now we use my handy-dandy metal punch to poke holes in the inside can. My punch didn't come with dies big enough to do the holes described in the instructions, so we made smaller holes and just had more of them. This metal punch has been discontinued as far as I can tell, so you'll have to use a drill or something to make your holes.

Using the punch to poke holes in the outer can. We used tape to give us a line for these since it'll actually show.

JB Weld all up in the house. We put this on the inner can and then put it into the outer can. in the future, we'll be applying the JB weld to the outer can and then sticking the inner can into it. Also, we'll be letting the JB Weld cure overnight before burning. We got impatient and burned after just an hour or so and cooked out most of the JB Weld, so now the whole thing rattles around.

So there you have it. Paint can on the outside, pineapple can on the inside, with the wire mesh on the bottom.

Test burn in the garage. We didn't feel like gathering wood, so we burned popsicle sticks. I have thousands of them. You may notice that there's some flame on the ground. That's because Isaac added a little alcohol to the wood in this stove by pouring it from the other stove and managed to make a right mess of things in the process. Isaac is why we can't have nice things.

After a while, the wood will stop burning smokily and you'll see the jets of flame coming out of the interior ring of holes. This is the wood gas burning. It works much better if you really pack the stove full of fuel and then just let it burn, but we kept adding small amount of wood to it over and over, so we were really slowing down the process. It's a really awesome effect to see in person.

Isaac, redeeming himself from the earlier alcohol debacle, built us a tiny pot stand to use with my Ti Cookpot. It worked beautifully. I haven't yet figured out how to get everything to nest, unfortunately. I'll keep working on it.


Okay, speaking of nesting, here's something very very cool. This wasn't planned, but I really don't know that you could plan it any better.

These are all the pieces. The wood gas stove, the cookpot and the aluminum stove.

If you turn the woodgas stove over and take the bottom off, you can slide the cookpot into the space between the two cans. It's a perfect fit. The best part is that the alcohol stove also nests inside the wood gas stove's inner compartment, and the whole thing fits into the little carry sack that came with the cookpot. You can have an alcohol-fueled mini-stove, a wood-fueled larger stove and a cookpot (w/ spork!) all in one really handy package. Awesome for camping where you don't know how long you'll be out or what the temperature will be, or what fuel you'll be able to find. Sounds like a bug out bag to me.

So there you go. Thanks so much for reading and please let me know if you have any questions.