Completing and installing the workshop heater which has morphed into a pot belly rocket stove. Plans are available for Purchase from our website: www.littleauss...
What a great use for those cast iron brake drums. Your use of vegetable oil is the way we preserve and seal cast iron cookware here in the US. looking at the ridges in the drums I can picture you winding copper tubing around to provide hot water for another use. Wishing you and your family a blessed week, gentle spring weather and restful evenings. Peace brother.
I enjoy your work and the way that you are willing to experiment so readily. It was great seeing you use the truck brake drums. Forty two years ago I built a log sauna in western Oregon. I built my stove using 3 cast steel truck drums. I put on facing the open side down, used a piece of 1/2" plate cut in a circle to seal the bottom of the fire box added another drum facing up and the third facing down. I cut a second piece of 1/2"plate, put and insulated handle on it and a pivot bolt through one of the lug stud holes so that I could swing the lid sideways to load the stove. I put a sliding tube draft at the bottom and made an oval shaped chimney neck for 6" pipe out the back at a 45° behind the lid. My daughter was one year old at the time and so little that she could get inside it with just the top of her head to her nose showing. I have a great photo of her in the stove. Also, if you want to use cast iron brake drums, you can use a nickle rod to weld with. You can also use a standard rod like 6013 if you preheat the drums where you are welding and do a series of short welds around the seam of the two upper drums. Eventually you will get one continuous weld around the drums. The stove was great in the sauna. Now, 42 years later, the same stove is sitting in my sauna in the farm I bought in Sweden. It is nice to take memories with you when you move even if they weigh more than 100 pounds!
Many years ago, my first paid job at age of 15 was standing on the end of a 9" grinder all day long. Learnt a lot or respect for the power sitting in ones hands.
You inspired me to build a rocket stove a year ago. As soon as I watched I immediately started to build a unit as a “heat engine”. I designed it to allow for a bolt on feature to allow for wok mount/ blackstone griddle mount/ pizza oven mount. So far so good. I plan to upload to my CyberCamp channel when complete looking for your comments. Thank you for your skillful work🙏🏻
Great job nice to see an actual rocket stove heater I have bin making them for years and yours is the best I have seen on here👍 I have found if you put the exhaust pipe at the bottom in line with the intake pipe you get the maximum heat and the out pipe is cold to touch and burns more efficiently and clean
You know I love your work, thanks for taking the time, you are an inspiration! I'm glad to see the family growing ;-) I've used the inside of a water heater for the drum, and I have a collection of discarded air compressor cylinders for future builds. Meanwhile, I've changed jobs and industries AGAIN, this time I'm building lowering enclosed aluminium trailers (weld free) with my former chief eng and have become the electrician as well since there is a lot of wiring on these for the winches. Sadly the boss I worked for for the past 4 years in NZ is on the brink of bankruptcy (again), while we patiently await residency in NZ.
Hi Craig. I hope your new job has good success and thank you for your support 👍 I was trying to think of substitutes for the break drums as I knew that they would be hard to come by for some people. I never even considered an old air compressor tank. That's brilliant.
you talking about the 9 inch grinder (i Love mine) reminded me of a time I walked into a workshop and just inside the door a 16 or 17 year old guy using one to grind down old bolt mounts. wearing a loose T shirt not giving the tool the respect it needs. I was there to talk to the workshop manager, first thing i said was get some one to show the young guy how to use the grinder correctly. No sooner had I said it, the grinder grabbed his T shirt and spun a full 360 degrees, and sliced him open right across his stomach about 30cm total. Manager said "thanks, wish you were here 5 minutes ago"
Nice project. I'm really liking the simplicity of it. I'm thinking, instead of the quite difficult to find old brake drums (With the associated asbestos dust risk), an old propane cylinder with an end cut off and then closed off with a slab of steel welded to form a cooking surface would be a pretty obtainable alternative.
I think this is my favourite stove of yours! You can really hear it roar! I just need to find the parts to make it and I’ll build one for our the back of our house under the patio.
Great videos... I bought a set of Your plans. Going to modify the brake drum section to an extended box cook top for use in the missionary field. Right above the riser is the hottest, but a side area can be used for simmer heat. Will turn the hopper around to make easier access to the cook top. Maybe a water heater tank below the extended simmer area. For inside use, I suggest a fresh air intake duct port be added with a damper to the side of the fire box. One mistake most make is not realizing that the fire needs air to burn. That air is the warm air You just spent all of Your money heating being sucked in, used and sent right up the chimney. By attaching a duct to the fire box, You can bring in fresh cold air from outside to feed the fire. Of course, You will also need to make a lid for the hopper.
You might consider having the joint between the drums breakable. I did a similar design with 2 propane canisters with a steel band welded to one so the other could slip on top of the other. A piece of insulation cord sealed the gaps. I could then take them apart to remove ash that accumulates inside over time. There’s a bit of math involved in determining the distance between the top of the riser and the cap over it. The area of the riser top (pi x r squared) should be equal to the area determined by the circumference of the riser and the height from the riser to the cap (2r x pi x h). Or you can just decide the radius of the riser in half to get the height. This will build a back pressure in the riser which increases the temperature in the riser and burns off any hydrocarbons yet unburned. 😅
7:50 you talk about the safety issues of 9” grinders. 24 years ago I was looking after a young guy who was working at a precast concrete factory. He was tasked with cleaning out the molds used to cast railway sleepers using a 9” grinder with a brush attachment. He was wearing a lexan face shield, two leather aprons, gloves and steel toed boots. Mid job, and with no warning, the brush disintegrated, and he was peppered with 3-5mm fragments of steel bristles. They went straight through the aprons, his boots apart from the steel caps. He ended up with fragments everywhere except his head and toes. Basically ruined his life in a split second.
Have you thought about using a large volume of water or mineral oils in a five gallon jacket around the heating chamber? We had these oil dripping submersion heaters when I was in the army. It heated a 55 gallon drum of water that radiated heat for hours.
Impressive Build! I like you are thinking about the heat extraction and providing lots of surface area for that to happen. " Finished just in time for summer..." I hear you there but there will always be next winter! for heating the shed, a fan would move the heat off the drums and into the work space more effectively and it wouldn't go straight up then either. If you also put some light tube like that spiral duct over the flue and had a fan on the top blowing air down, that would harvest a lot of useful heat as well. The ability to cook on this is also impressive. A great and practical design. well done!
Very nice work. No way to control the burn :( Look like you will go through a ton of wood and have to constantly feed this beast. However, you will be warm while doing so. Thanks for the contribution Im Spartacvs
Awesome channel, very inspirational. Definitely going to try to replicate your ideas. I’m intrigued with pellet burning and that you can turn used coffee grinds into pellets using a diy pellet mill. Not sure my execution would be as successful as yours though. Great works and thanks so much!👍
Very nice look. As someone who heated a house for many years with wood and pellets, I would probably want more access for cleaning out soot and other things that accumulate in the "pot" and the flue. Once it gets cold, will be curious how long those drums stay warm after the fire burns out. Also it seems the end of your video repeats.
Hi Derek. You make a very good point about servicing the stove, I will take that into consideration on future builds. The drums stay hot for a good hour once the fire goes out. I will test this more once it starts cooling of down here again. Thank for letting me know about the end repeating, I missed that one.
I love the look of this stove! the drums look awesome!.. Goodpoint on servicing! although i have a pellet stove I'm working on right now! and during testing 4 litres of pellets leave only an egg cup of ash!, i ran it for 3 days, and was supprised how little ash it produced! here is a short vid if interested, not giving too much away as awaiting patent!.. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-i75uwJYIw1o.html
burning mixed wood helps some what with soot, especially spruce helps burn soot. Some people like to only burn birch and are wondering where all this soot comes from..
I made a couple of rocket stoves a few years back with a hopper and basket set to run on wood pellets. They ran really well, and could last around 4 hours on a hopper load. The only problem is they get sooo hot that the pellets start to ‘off-gas’ and sweat their oil in the hopper, and I could never get a way to deal with the smoke. On one I tried to put a vent pipe to the flue, but it then started a fire in the hopper.
Hello to you on the other side of the earth fella. The drums you used are from what make and model vehicle or at least size would help ??? Also, you should of made a batch box rocket stove. Then you would load every four to eight hours. Which is really nice LAR, the less you have to mess with the stove the better way. Good day and peace to you fella too. vf
@@LittleAussieRockets Thanks for the answer Sir. Now I know what to look for to use on my stove. Good day and so glad you took the leap to work on your own. Just love your family farm of carrots. Have to be honest, I am a carrot connaisseur. Good luck with your endeavors fella on the other side of the world. Peace from USA.
19" medium truck steel wheels ( or 22.5" or 24" ) Eliminates any chance welding cast iron. ( specilty welding draws extra $) Got to have the extra space though.
This was a great build, this is the most aesthetically pleasing Rocket stove drum mass heater i have seen yet. I know trying to make a 45gal drum not look like a drum is hard to do without burying half of it in a Cob mass but... Even the 'Liberator' certified US stove looks like a slick version of a diy rocket mass heater! What was the weight for those 2 brake drums, around 130lb/60kg? I especially like your almost calculated honesty, 'meh, well i measured wrong which left a 5mm gap, buuuut i thought it might be useful later' Just like me you'd had enough of grinding/welding and wanted to set fire to stuff, well a wet rag stuffed in the gap would do the trick to see if it needed plugged! As a man after my own heart here's my own Organic design philosophy: It isn't a failure if you aren't building to specification, It's just not finished yet😉 Glad you are doing well, all the best to you and the ever growing family in this turbulent time. Keep on, keeping on!
I totally agree with you on cast irons ability to radiate heat and be a heat sink at the same time. I would bet the drums you are using are Nodular iron. They are way easier to weld and crack resistant. The wavy outside of the brake drums are probably two to one surface area(Linear measure) for cooling the actual items function on the truck during usage for breaking. This is a dynamite reusage of the form function for upscaling on usage of item. I would bet you the engineer who designed the drum made sure the radiation of heat would be spread out in all directions from the radial plane. The spacing between the vertical heat riser on the rocket stove and the top of the drum you said was 6 inches like the diameter but you used square tubing. What is the difference between using square tubing vs. round tubing in the rocket stove ??? You then used smaller round tubing into a square tube then round again ??? What was the size of both exhaust square and round on the smoke exhaust side ?? Look forward to your answers as you have been working with rocket stoves for a few years now. Peace
The corrugated/ridged surface on the drums will certainly increase the surface area for heat radiation. Good idea. 👍 How would you improvise a device to help circulate your heat?
I put another tube on the bottom cut a hole so the ashes would fall down. I could burn one hours worth of pellets at a clip the hottest I ever got it was 1,000° Fahrenheit
I'm curious... and maybe there's a reason for it... but: Inside the drum, why did you have the heat from the fire go through the inner tube and then out along the inside of the drum vs have the heat from the fire go directly into the drum and then have it exhaust through the inner tube? If the idea was to radiate the heat via the drum, wouldn't it make more sense to have it go through the drum first? Or does it not really matter either way? Also, is there any plans to put a heat shield on the drum to prevent people from accidently brushing up against it and burning themselves? Or are you not worried about that for your build?
"Taller riser" makes me wonder what too tall would be. I've heard rules of thumb with riser height 3 to 4 times the diameter. I've seen videos of guys buildingrocket fired garden radiant heaters that have 4"⊙ by 49.5" glass tube! Height at 12 X diameter...
I like it but I must ask? How well does it heat your shop. Your shop looks large with tall celling. My shop is 50 ft x 30 ft. Do you think it will work in my shop?🤔
My workshop is very open, so it only takes the edge off the cold. It's certainly worth having though and makes life more Bearable in winter ❄️ I think that it would heat your workshop providing it wasn't as open to the elements.
i want to ask if its possible in windy days to push air back and get the fire to the filling place if yes it might be dancerus to have a big filling place
So how well does it heat your shop? I know it doesn't get all that cold down there, but my shop isn't yet insulated but it gets pretty cold in the midwest. As it is now. I ask cause I recentlty built one and am not very happy with it's perormance after I ran the stack to it. it goes from 4 to 3 inch. Which looks like a comparable size change when I look at yours. Wtf am I doing wrong? Mind you I do not have a mass on it yet either...
how about flour baked into a shape then turned into full mesh block of carbon like ceramics, carbonized into a shape, heat resistance is very high, over 3000C, of pure carbon, yes it might burn itself if a rocket stove, like coal, but coal requires very hot temperature to actually burn
after stick welding all that - then resorting to MIG , oh well technology advances. if using a 44Gal dram it needs to be a really old one - the post 1980s ones are too thin-walled to be durable at high 'oxidative;' temps. ...
@@LittleAussieRockets My old Bosch 9inch don't even have an deadman switch. You turn it on, and it stays on until actively switched off - by design from Bosch. I have a lot of respect for that one. A lot.
Just bought your plans, thanks for making them available so inexpensively. i enjoy your channel very much. I have a burning question that I hope you have already answered for yourself. Is there a height ratio between the burn tube and the exhaust tube on a "J" style rocket stove? Or can you make the burn/fuel tube long enough to put decent length (3 or 4 feet) sticks to get a longer burn, without affecting the exhaust end?
Aaah. Ok. Got it. Thanks. Don't want competing chimneys, and it's been found that 1:2:4 works better than 1:2:3. Make sure to share this with some guy over there. Love your channel man.
