8 Simple Rocket Stoves - How to Make Simple Camping & Survival Stoves

hey Luke here at the outdoor boys YouTube channel today I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know about rocket stoves and I'm gonna show you a couple different ways you can make your own rocket stove at home real cheap real easy a rocket stove is a super efficient wood-burning stove allows you to cook an entire meal with just a handful of sticks they can be light portable easy to make but the benefits is that you don't have to carry any fuel with you so if you're traveling light or if you're in a prepper situation these are really great hey Jacob we gonna help me with my rocket stove video you got a stick okay good all rocket stoves are basically l-shaped wood-burning stoves that look like this you drop a bunch of sticks in the vertical section you catch them on fire and the heat goes up through the vertical section like so and then fresh air and oxygen is drawn in through the horizontal section and what makes these so effective and so efficient is that it concentrates the heat and sends it upwards to where if your cooking pan is by using a rocket stove and concentrating all of that heat you're gonna get a much more efficient burn and you're gonna use that heat much more effectively so this allows you to cook and do a lot with just a handful of sticks one of the simplest rocket stoves to bake is the Dakota fire hole just go and find yourself a little slope and excavate out the basic L shape of a fire hole you can do this with your hands or a stick doesn't have to be very big and you just drop in some sticks here light them on fire and there you go the air comes in this way heat goes out this way last month we posted a video where me and my boys dug and slept in an underground bunker which was basically a giant Dakota fire hole we basically dug a big hole and then made the l-shaped fireplace in the side of the hill and that's the same technique as a Dakota fire hole only on a much much bigger scale rocket stoves are so simple there's many different ways to build them and one of my favorite is drilling a 90 degree hole or an l-shaped hole in a solid piece of wood then take some framing nails and put about four or five framing nails around the circumference of the would round to lay your teakettle or your frying pan on top last month when we were ice fishing in Alaska we use this technique to make a rocket stove that we brought out on to the ice so that we could have hot chocolate and something to warm the kids hands up on generally speaking you'll get about one hour of burn time for every inch of radius you have on the log if you like that trick but you want a smaller more portable rocket stove try using a four by four post this eight-foot length was $2.00 at the hardware store all right I'm gonna cut off six inches all right take your six inch piece of wood and a 1 inch drill bit and drill a hole vertically right in the dead center for this demo I'm using a 1 in the quarter inch drill bit but I've successfully used 3/4 inch one inch and one in the quarter inch the bigger the drill bit though the easier it is to start the rocket stove we're gonna gather up some of these shavings we're just gonna dump some of this shavings in here and you don't want to block the hole you need you need to be able to have air flow in and out see how the smokes traveling this direction always turn the rocket stove so the mouth is facing into the wind get as much air going in there as you can all right I'm gonna set a timer and we're gonna see how long this little 4x4 rocket stove will last and I'm gonna try to boil some water on my little stove so you need little spacers to allow the smoke and flames to escape and you want to put them like so and line them up so that they're parallel with the direction of the wind and then we're just gonna lay that down right there we've got about three cups of water in there we're gonna see how long it takes for that to boil well we're about five minutes in and the fire is now self-sustaining the inside diameter of the hole has caught fire so I don't need to put any more wood in to keep this rocket stove going until it's fully consumed well this eight-foot post cost me two dollars and I can get sixteen rocket stoves out of this one post so that means each rocket stove cost me about twelve and a half cents not bad one really nice thing about rocket stoves is they work great in the rain the pot keeps rain from getting in the vertical hole and as long as you don't have rain going inside that hole you're golden alright we're exactly 21 minutes in and we've got boiling water and you've got to boil water for a full 1 minute to clean it at sea level so about 22 minutes we should have three cups of drinking water and you can see here we're not quite halfway consumed the rocket stove still has a lot of fuel to give what you'll find is that the rocket stove burns faster and hotter the longer it goes as the hole gets bigger there's more surface area to burn and that puts out more flame and that could zoom the wood faster one nice thing about these rocket stoves is you can pick them up and move it around and because this one's made out of wood I can hold it not burn myself and you can see here the bottom has it charred yet so if I had this on a table it wouldn't ruin the table so I wouldn't put this inside a tent or put it on your favorite table or anything but you can move it around a little bit and that is nice we're at 29 minutes and you can see here that the front of the rocket stove is starting to burn the way through the top still has a lot of wood left but we'll see how long it lasts if you want to you can put out the rocket stove and save it to use it later just sprinkle a little water on it try not to go too heavy-handed because you don't want to try to light a waterlogged rocket stove alright we're at 37 and a half minutes you can see the front of the rocket stove is burnt all the way through and I'm gonna go ahead and put the pot back on the top and we're gonna see how long it can sit there without that pot falling over [Music] well the pot fell over at almost 60 minutes exactly so that gives you an hour of cook time on this little 4x4 rocket stove that's more than enough to cook a nice meal or to boil two big pots of water each one of these rocket stoves seems to burn a little bit differently you want it to burn as evenly as possible that'll get you more burn time and how you drill the holes how you feed the wood which way the winds blowing all that kind of affects which side burns out first now if you want a rocket stove it's a little bit more permanent I'm gonna show you a great way how to make a metal rocket stove at home we're gonna make a sheet steel rocket stove from these HVAC t joints here there's the four inch one the six inch one and the eight inch one the four inch one here is about twelve dollars and they go on up to price to about eighteen dollars turning this into a rocket stove can be as simple or as complicated as you want depending on how many bells and whistles you want if you want to do it the easy way just go ahead and dump a bunch of sticks right into the top of the T joint so there you go you can just take the basic T joint and turn it into a rocket stove with no construction whatsoever this little T intersection by itself works really good as a rocket stove but there's a few problems first off the galvanization comes off and that makes it susceptible to rust additionally it's kind of tippy the other thing is there's no way to carry it without a pair of tongs and there's issues with how do you cook on it or how do you keep the rain out of it all of those issues can be solved really easily so this little cap you can buy for a few dollars at the hardware store it goes on to any of these four inch t units and you can bend it to make it flat and then you can put a kettle or scale it on top of it and it'll help keep the rain out as well once you've used the t-intersection once the galvanization will oxidize and kind of get this powdery look then you can go and paint it with some high heat spray paint that's designed for like stoves and barbecues and stuff and that will protect it from rust and make it look nicer [Music] the next thing I'm gonna do is put a handle on this thing so you can transport it alright here's my improved do-it-yourself rocket stove I've got the same HVAC t-joint but I've taken a four inch to six inch adapter and I've done a really crappy job drilling holes and cutting these triangles in it which allow the smoke and air to circulate through it even when you've got a pot on top and then here in the bottom I've poured a couple inches of grout that's designed for high heat situations like fireplaces and that gives it some weight so it no longer wants to tip over now it's quite sturdy then I took this little bit of a steel bar and I made a handle just bent it and put it in some holes I drilled in the side and came up with this little wood dowel so now I can pick it up and lift it around without burning myself so a couple things about this design first you want to make sure that the handle is long enough so that it hits down low where the mortar is not where the fire is because otherwise it'll burn the handle secondly if you put some high heat cement or mortar down in the bottom it insulates it so it doesn't get hot down here and it won't burn whatever it's sitting on so you can put it on a park table or a bench or something and you won't leave a big char mark there I really like this adaptor for cooking because you can fit a pot on top of it just like that and it's really sturdy it's not gonna accidentally fall off like that if you're looking for a portable durable high-quality rocket stove that you can purchase check out the Kelly Kettle and what the Kelly Kettle is is a rocket stove with a water reservoir around the vertical part of the rocket stove you pour water here at the top and that water gets heated up by the heat that comes through the metal on the rocket stove there's also this little attachment that you can put in the top so that you can cook on top of the rocket stove as well and in previous videos I've even cooked Scotch eggs on my Kelly Kettle they're really versatile you can cook on them you can boil water and they're portable high quality and pretty easy to get a hold of I'll put a link in the description to where you can purchase these now if you're a little bit of a welder and you want a rocket stove that's very durable and you don't mind the weight you can build one using four inch channel pipe that unfortunately I don't have a welder that can handle this so I can't demonstrate it here for you today now I'm going to show you how to build rocket stove using just four cinder blocks if you don't want to mess with cutting a cinder block you can buy an h-shaped cinder block or you can just get a couple pavers and make your own very simple rocket stove made out of four cinder blocks airflow comes in here combustion happens here heat and exhaust comes out there and if you want you can bust out this side and make two burners and if you don't want to mess with cutting cinder blocks just use pavers or bricks and then you can go and build the same sort of L shape very easily on all of these rocket stoves you want the air intake hole pointing upwind so you get maximum airflow up through the bottom of the flame now building a rocket stove out of cinder blocks is fine it'll last a little while but the hotter and longer you use this the more the cinder blocks will start to crumble and break down and crack you really want to make a permanent structure you need to use fire brick if you want to cook on this thing what you want to do is take the old pieces of cinder block put them right there and then you can rest your frying pan or your kettle or your pot or whatever right on top and you can cook off this thing the real benefit of these rocket stoves is that they're just so darn efficient so if you're in a place or a situation where you can't get your hands on large quantities of firewood then build a rocket stove alright next I'm going to show you how to use a pair of pliers and some baling wire to make a rocket stove out of a pile of wood first things first taste a nice long piece of baling wire lay it down on the ground in front of you and start stacking some wood on top of it you want these as tight as you can together I'm gonna take one small smooth piece of wood and you're going to fit it right in the heart of it alright you want this as tight as possible so we got a nice tight bundle of logs there then you're gonna do let's take that middle piece and pull it out have a nice hole right there in the middle okay alright so we've got the bundle of logs with the hole for the vertical chimney in the middle we've got air flow on the bottom and just take another log lay it right there and now we have something to rest stove or kettle on whoo look at that that went from 0-60 so quick you know depending on how much airflow you have between the gaps you can go ahead and put that down and often it doesn't make a difference this rocket stove is not as efficient and not as useful for cooking as the other rocket stoves I showed you but it uses the principles of rocket stoves to allow you to ignite a lot of logs very quickly using very little kindling so it's a great way to start a fire if you like this sort of thing you might want to check out Swedish torches which is a way of taking a wood round chopping it up then putting it back together and building a fire in the middle this is just kind of more of a redneck version of a Swedish torch well hopefully you guys enjoyed learning about rocket stoves and how to make them if you want to see more great videos from the outdoor boys youtube channel don't forget to click subscribe we have over 200 videos on our Channel right now including 14 ways to start a fire without matches 24 best campfire recipes my favorite knots and how to tie them there's a little something for everyone and you may not know this but I have another channel that's even bigger the catfish and carp youtube channel with over 600 videos about fishing and so if you want to see that I'll put a link in the description as well so don't forget to click subscribe we put out new videos every Saturday morning thanks for watching if you like this video don't forget to check out the outdoor boys TV channel where we have hundreds of videos and don't forget to click subscribe so you can see other great videos every Saturday morning and hit that Bell button you'll get notifications thanks for watching you've got so many boogers

Channel: Outdoor Boys

Views: 1,083,512

Rating: 4.8822937 out of 5

Keywords: Rocket stove, stove, wood burning stove, how to make rocket stove, simple rocket stove, camping stove, survival stove, homestead, camping, survival camping, metal rocket stove, wood rocket stove, Swedish torch, Dakota Fire Hole, Kelly kettle, DIY rocket stove, DIY stove, How to make stove, homemade rocket stove, easy rocket stove, how to build a rocket stove, building a rocket stove, Using a rocket stove

Id: FMhUFthG4bU

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GentleScrunt]

Luke Nichols is what you call an American Hero.

[u/Average_Lefty]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMhUFthG4bU

[u/Jaystings]

Use a leafblower on one to piss off your mother: https://youtu.be/K8FwMlkoxjI.