The Straight Bellied Stove.
aka
- the Pipe stove
I
have a room at Nimbin Rocks
which gets rather cold in winter. In keeping with the let's
recycle and not spend money theme I made this stove. A friend left
some pipe under my house when he was homeless for a while - now he
didn't want it back. It was about 150mm across and 10mm thick - a
heavy pipe. I don't own any oxy cutting equipment so I bought a
pile of abrasive cutting disks for my power saw and my angle
grinder and went to work. I spent a huge amount of time cutting
grinding and welding but I'm pleased with the outcome. The stove
is about 1200mm tall with a 65 mm chimney welded to the back and
two sliding doors for wood and ash. I welded a piece of the same
pipe inside the bottom giving a concave sloping bottom to ease
removal of ash. There's a ring welded inside above the lower door
to hold a grate. In practice the top door in kept closed and the
bottom door raise 10 or 20 mm to allow air to the fire. The stove
seems to work best without the grate as a build up of ash helps
keep the fire smouldering. The room is very draughty (windy even)
and uninsulated so the stove didn't heat it up much but once these
problems are fixed I'm sure it will be nice and toasty. I don't
have a good seal at the lid - this is fairly normal for wood
stoves but with the small chimney smoke leaks out during the
lighting phase, I've tried making a removable lid (pyrex) with a
silicone rubber seal and this is looking promising.
While testing the stove outdoors and without a lid - the coals became white hot and a metal rod place there came out yellow hot - so I think there some potential for a similar unit to be used as a forge.
Hits since 26/june/98 =