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.

Stoves!

So, this weekend, my friend Isaac came over and we made some stoves. Before that, I tried to do some testing with a stove my friend Martin lent me, to see what we thought about the design options we had available. Here's how it all went down.

This is Martin's stove, nestled down inside my fire pit. It's a really awesome little stove, and very well made. If you aren't interested in building stoves and would rather buy one, this one is pretty awesome. Here's where you can get it: WhiteBox Stoves.

This is probably as good a time as any to explain how this works. The stove doesn't need a pot stand, doesn't need a priming pan. It's one little self-contained unit, which I think makes it perfect for putting into an emergency kit. All you do is fill it up with some fuel, then light it. The fuel will burn in the main chamber in the middle while it heats up the stove itself. Once the stove gets hot enough, the alcohol inside starts to boil, and the gas comes out the little holes on the side and ignites. Then you get this really pretty fire flower sort of effect. You put the pot on top and voila. All set. The reason I mention pot stands and priming pans is that some designs do need those things. A pot stand is basically just something to put the pot on so it isn't sitting on top of the stove directly. Some stove designs require air to flow in through the top, so you have to have a pot stand. Also, some stoves can't self-heat, so you have to use a wick or a priming pan to heat them up. For those, you put some fuel on the wick or in the priming pan and light that, and then that will burn and heat up the stove. It isn't the end of the world, but it's more pieces to worry about. This is an elegant design, I think.

This is my titanium cook pot. It's pretty awesome, and you can get it here: Ti Cookset It comes with the pot, the lid, a titanium spork and a bag to carry it all. I like it because it's a good size for boiling enough water to rehydrate a Mountain House meal or make hot cocoa or whatever, but it's not way bigger than I need.

This is the fuel we used for testing purposes. it's super cheap, you can get it anywhere, and it burns nice and clean.

I took pictures of the little stove without the pot on it, but you can't see the flames in the full sunlight so they're kinda dull. It was crazy windy out, so the poor stove kept blowing out, even inside the protection of the firepit. It still did get the water very nearly to boiling, though. In super-windy conditions, a windscreen would be very nice. I'm thinking about a design for one, and I'll post it up here if I get it figured out.

When Isaac came over, we wanted to do another test of the stove to make sure that it wasn't going out because the pot was suffocating it, so we did a burn in the garage and it worked beautifully. You can see the flame jets here pretty clearly.

Did you know Bud Light was available in aluminum bottles? Neither did I. Mostly because I don't drink beer and even if I did, I wouldn't drink Bud Light. But the bottle is very useful for this exercise, and so I bought some. The lady at the store asked "Is this any good?" and I said "I have no idea. I'm going to go home and pour it down the drain." Anyway, you take one of these bottles and empty it out in whatever manner pleases you most, then make some cuts in it. We used a large pipe-cutting tool (which you will have seen on my home improvement blog) to make the cuts and it seemed to work pretty well. I'm thinking we may just use the bandsaw for the cuts in the future, though. Anyway, you can decide how big you want your stove to be, and that will influence your cuts. We made ours roughly 2" tall, so we cut about 2 1/4" off the bottom and cut the top of the bottle off right where it stops curving down and goes straight into the sides of the bottle.

Now you want to prep the "top" which will become the inside of the stove. You cut the top down so from the wide part, it's about 2" long. The wide part will end up being up and will seal against the inside of the bottom of the bottle. The bottom part will rest against the bottom of the inside of the bottle. To provide a means for the alcohol to flow from the middle to the outer chamber, you need to make these little grooves in the neck part. We used a very small file. Just about anything would work. They don't have to be any particular shape, but keep them pretty small.

This is what I mean. You get the top turned over and stuck down inside here. This is all friction fit so there's no glue or rivets or anything. Again, it's a very simple, elegant design.

Now, we're rolling the edge of the outer piece over the top of the inner piece to lock them We used an aluminum bar fragment to kinda push them over and if I had it to do over again, I would've used a piece of wooden dowel instead. But still, it worked. We got our rolled edge and it actually looked okay. Not as pretty as the WhiteBox one by a long way, but not too awful, either. Essentially all I did was to use the bar to push the outer edge in and down so it folded over the inside layer. There's not a ton of finesse to it. After that, we put the stove down on the bench top and used the bar to squeeze down and smooth out the edge a bit.

We're drilling the holes. We waited until this point to do it for no real reason, and I think I'd prefer to do it before the inside piece is in for the future. Any little drilling particles that get inside would be much easier to get out that way. We also though the drill holes would be much larger than the thumbtack holes and so we spaced them farther apart. We didn't need to. They're actually very close to being the same size, so putting them as far apart as we did just meant less flame on the stove.

So there's our goofy little stove. it isn't perfect, but it's a decent first try.

And it's enough to boil some water.

So that's the end of that stove, and the end of this post. I'll write up the other stove tomorrow, hopefully.

Thanks for reading!