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!

Kydex Sheaths for Fun and Profit

Hey, all! Haven't posted here in a while, mostly because I haven't been doing much crafting. I've been seeing and hearing people talk about making kydex sheaths and holsters for a while, and I've been wanting to give it a try. Here's what I did and what I learned. My friend Werespaz came over to help out, which was definitely cool. Two heads are better than one, and that's doubly true when one of the heads is mine.

Start with a plank o' wood. Actually, this is a sheet of OSB. It should work just fine. This is 3/4" which is pretty heavy-duty. I decided it isn't heavy-duty enough for me, though.

Cut it into two 12"x12" squares. You can make it any size and shape you want, but 12"x12" is a good basic size.

I also cut four 12" pieces of 2x4 for reinforcement. I don't know that I needed to do this, but it may help make the thing a little stronger and last a little longer.

A little wood glue...

Some screws...

And we have forming plates!

We're building the sheath for this bad boy. It's a cheap Gerber knife but it has served me well over the years.

First, we used the bandsaw to cut the kydex to the right size.

We made a cardboard mockup first, to get a better idea of how it was all going to work. Since this is my first project and I hadn't really considered the details just yet, it took some serious thinking to figure out the design.

Now, we heat the kydex with the heat gun.

We didn't get pictures of the "putting the kydex around the knife and clamping them both in the foam" bit because it went pretty quickly, but this is the end product. Let sit for 5 minutes. While we wait, let's discuss the forming method. You heat up the kydex until it's floppy. We didn't heat it quite enough the first couple of times, and it won't form right unless it is really thoroughly heated. Next, you lay it on top of (or fold it around) the object you want to mold, and then clamp it between two sheets of foam. The foam puts pressure on the kydex and presses it against the object, which is what gives you your shape. This actually works really well for objects less than an inch thick, or where you're molding around something where you want front and back molded. I'm going to try vacuum-forming this stuff eventually too, but not just yet.

You can see just the barest outline of the knife in there. That's as much detail as we're getting with this blade and kydex this thick (I chose .080" for this batch, since it's sort of a middle-of-the-road thickness). You may also notice that the end are kind bubbly. That's because we clamped the entire knife in the foam. The handle material is too thick and drops off too suddenly for the foam to put significant pressure on the kydex right next to the grips. We re-heated and re-pressed a couple of times to get it right, and eventually just hung the handle of the blade out of the side so the foam pressed directly on the kydex. That worked much better.

That there is a test rivet and the holes we drilled once we got the shape right. The holes were very slightly too small, so a different drill bit will be in order for next time.

And there she is! She's ugly, but we ended up sanding to smooth the curves and than sanding more with finer sandpaper to put a really smooth finish on the cut surfaces. It's actually really nice. It hols the blade perfectly, I'd say. No amount of shaking up and down (with the handle down) will dislodge the knife, but it pulls free quite easily. We ended up simplifying the design so now it's essentially non-functional. Basically, we couldn't think of a good way to attach the belt clip with the tools and materials we had, so we just didn't. This is a first draft anyway, so I doubt I'll ever und up using it. It was a great way to learn, though. next up: a leatherman holster!

Thanks for reading!

Making a cardboard and paraffin camp stove

Hey all! It has been way too long since I posted here. I got into my new house a while back and haven't had the time or space to do much of anything since then. I did decide to try something pretty fun last night, so I thought I'd do a writeup for you all.

Start with a tin. This one is 3" in diameter and maybe 1.25-1.5" tall. The size honestly doesn't make much of a difference. The box of Spree in the background is optional.

Get a piece of cardboard. This is just an example, as the piece I ended up using was something like 7 feet long. Try to get it cut at an even width all the way along the length. Making a mark or something would be much easier. If you don't do this now, you'll have to do it later and that's a big pain. I'd make it so that the edge of the cardboard sits maybe 1/8" below the rim of the tin if I had it to do over again.

Tear off one side of the cardboard. What this does is to give you a piece of paper with the corrugations attached. When you roll it up, you'll have little pockets between the layers, which will hold the wax, sort of like a honeycomb. I don't know for sure that leaving the side on there would ruin the stove, but I didn't want to experiment with this one.

There you go. Roll it up and stuff it in there. You want it to be snug, but you don't want to ruin your structure to fit it inside.

Melt your paraffin wax on your stove. I have a dedicated pot I got from Ross for $3 and it works well for me.

I put foil over a cookie sheet to use as a pouring platform.

I also have a muffin tin for the extra wax. Thankfully, the previous owners of our house left some nasty old muffin tins in the base of the stove they had torn the door off of and left for us. So now they're my craft tins.

Pour the wax into the tin. I didn't have it all melted first, but that's fine. It will go in and fill up the tin pretty well, and it will soak into the cardboard. You may have to go back in a bit and fill it up the rest of the way. Just try to make sure you have the surface of the cardboard all pretty well covered. You'll have to burn some of it off, but you don't want to have just bare cardboard on here or it'll burn right off and give you gaps in the surface.

There's the tin all full of wax, and the rest goes into the muffin pan now.

I got about 5 of the cups full with the wax. These serve as reloads for the stove. Once you get a good solid flame going on top of the stove (ideally, the flame should be coming from the whole surface), you can drop one of these on top and let the heat melt the wax down into the cardboard again. You could also melt it and pour it in manually, but that's a bit lame when you have the self-reloading option.

I've got video of the first burn tests, but I haven't edited them yet so this pic is a placeholder. Here's what I learned: This thing works like a candle. You need to burn the wax off of the wick first in order to get something to catch. When your wick is a 3" diameter piece of cardboard, that's kinda tough. I did eventually get it to start by shoving some matchsticks down into the cardboard and letting them burn down. After it cooled from this, I went back and tried it with just a regular lighter and it lit up much faster and more evenly. I think getting a good solid burn on it is just a matter of getting a tiny bit of wick exposed over the whole surface. You'll see the flames on the video. It's really pretty impressive.

(Watch on youtube here: Paraffin Stove)

So there you go. It took a very short time to complete and cost me a total of maybe $2.50 if you're extremely generous on the price of the wax. You can also use found tins for this. If you use pomade or margarita salt or something that comes in a tin like this, those would work just fine. You can also use an old tuna can or a soup can or something if you want to. I like the tin because it's sort of self-contained and has a lid. Please let me know if you have any questions on how to make one of these or really anything else you want to know on the subject. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best. Thanks for reading!

Slight Change in Design

We were working on the project some more, and came up with a different idea for how to do it. So here's the updated design:

The lid is also made of slats now, but the bottom is still solid. The bottom row of slats also goes around the outside instead of sitting on top of the bottom. This is so we can use a piece of plywood for the bottom without having to buy edge-banding for it. Smart, huh?

The box as it will look closed. I think the slats on the top really make it look more consistent.

Here it is with a fake wood pattern on it. We're making this out of red oak, as I think I mentioned, and it will have a lovely, dark finish. We're going to put a fair amount of polyurethane on here too, to protect it from the elements, and I'm thinking a satin finish will look best. The bike is shiny, but super-shiny wood always looks a little weird to me for some reason.

I changed the inside of the lid, too. I think the two pieces resting on the inner supports will be plenty, and again, it just looks more like a crate this way.

We still haven't gotten past the planning and purchasing phase, but I hope this weekend will change all that. Thanks for reading!

Bicycle Basket

My lovely wife has a great bike that she really loves, an Electra Amsterdam Classic named Charlotte.

 The bike is beautiful, and it would be perfect for riding to the park for a picnic or something. We just need a means to carry picnic to the park.

The baskets we've found are always really expensive, though. Solution: Build our own. Here's the idea:

This is the body of the basket. It's more of a crate, actually. The outside pieces are 1.5" x .25" slats in red oak. The inside supports are red oak 1x2s (actually 1.5" x .75"). The bottom will be either a piece of red oak plywood or a solid piece of red oak if we can find it.

We have plans for a lid, as well. It could open this way...

But I think we like this better. We'll probably end up adding some extra features, like some leather straps to hold it closed. The inner frame you see attached to the lid will fit inside the outer slats and keep the lid from moving around too much. We don't want it to scratch up the bike at all (my wife seriously loves this bike and is very protective of her), so we're going to mount the box to the rack with some hardware backed with leather to protect the finish.

We're hoping this works out pretty well and costs less than the pre-made baskets do. We need to make sure we can get everything within our budget before we get started so we can take back the pieces we bought last night if it turns out it's going to cost too much. So far it's just a plan, but I think we'll get started with it pretty quickly. The project itself isn't too tough, so we should be able to finish it in a few days of working. I'll post updates as we make progress.