[Kartographer]

For those who haven’t seen it before here is a picture of my finished stove.

Here’s a picture of the fuel I started my test with. It’s mostly broken off pieces of wooden shipping pallets and I small amount of shredded paper from my shreader.


As soon as I had a fire going in the fire box I set a 2 quart aluminum pan filled with two quarts of tap water on the stove. (Please I do not wish to hear from anyone the dangers of cooking with aluminum!) 12 minutes and 56 seconds later the water in the pan was at a rolling boil.

Note no smoke coming from the stove. But caution the stove did smoke and quite a bit at first. I believe it was caused by a coat of oil on the stove pipe you often have from the manufacturing process. So don’t wait until an emergency to use your stove for the first time. You need to test it out and let it burn off this coat. Also you will get some smoke if you push your fuel in to far, keep it in the fire box area and out of the stove pipe bend and you will be fine.

As soon as the water came to a rolling boil I stopped adding any more fuel to the fire and the water continued a rolling boil for 6 minutes and 12 seconds. This is a picture of how much fuel I had left.


And lastly after the fire was completely out and the ashes cooled this is what was left in the firebox.

[little jeremiah]

That is seriously impressive. I like the part about the smoke not being in one’s face, and it uses very little fuel.

[sawmill trash]

Very neat stove ... hope to copy-kat it.

[Taffini]

*bump* prep stove

[DuncanWaring]

Is there any sort of consensus on what diameter flue pipe to use?

Also, is there any reason you have to operate with the lid on? Can you just run the pipe up to the top of the can, take the lid off entirely, and put something like a BBQ grill on top of it?

[Dead Corpse]

I wonder if filling the can with refractory cement might work better than vermiculite...

I may need to try this. I need some more refractory for my new forge pan anyway... ;-)

[DuncanWaring]

Yet another question - If I were to fabricate the parts associated with combustion, prop them up somehow, and fire it up, would you expect that would be representative of how it would actually burn when mounted in the ammo can?

[SkyPilot]

Wow! That looks great, and burns so efficiently! Terrific job.