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Comment by Vlad Jovanovic on January 5, 2013 at 1:46pm

Hi Bob. It's basically Jim Fisks gassification stove with just a couple of modifications, and really beefed up materials. (The barrels are JNA made 2.5mm thick, instead of your standard 0.6mm thick oil drums). The 5mm plate is 1) a heat sheild and 2) a shelf where I can stack some bricks for some added thermal mass. Above that plate is a baffle and then above the baffle is a flue tube. The tube you were referring to is the combustion tube...like on a Rocket Mass Stove, hence the protective heat shields...

I really like the (classic) Rocket Stove design, but in order for it to work there are some design proportions that you need to respect. Namely, that your feed tube plus your horizontal burn tube equal X, then your vertical combustion tube needs to be X times 1.5. Which means that I would have to somehow acquire a slave from one of the neighboring tribes to feed the rocket stove with fresh sticks every couple of hours, cuz I'm not about to sleep out in the GH and do that.

Now, I have been using a small fan to inject air into that air tube at the bottom, so it's not totally passive like a classic RMH (it does somewhat have that 'rocket effect' even without the fan, but boy does it take off when I turn the fan on. I believe the fan is what compensates for not adhering to the X times 1.5 deal. A couple of Watts is a small price to pay for being able to load this thing up and walk away for 8 to 12 hours or more. 

I have a 21mm 304L SS Steel tube (1.5mm wall thickness) that I managed to bend into a nice U shape (miraculously I did not crinkle it) that I want to incorporate into the lower barrel as hot water element in the future. It's been a fun project, and I'm grateful that I've gotten to learn a bit about fire, how and why wood burns...and how some different stoves work.

Comment by Bob Campbell on January 4, 2013 at 9:22am

Vlad I'm not familiar with this type of stove.  It looks like the top barrel is supposed to re-burn gasses, but I wonder if you would be willing to tell me more about how this stove works.  There also appears to be a plate welded slightly above the hole where I assume you would connect a flue pipe, so I'm curious how you will vent this stove