Chinese Folding Wood Burning Stove

I have another stove I want to share with you this time it's what's been referred to as the Chinese fire box if you're interested in hearing more about this stove keep watching okay before we begin I just want to take a moment to explain Who I am in my backyard rather than in the woods filming this video that's where of course I'd much sooner be well Nova Scotia like most of the world is now in a state of emergency as a result of the pandemic and all the wilderness areas all the parks all the trails both in the municipalities and across the province have all been closed to public travel so while I would sooner be in the woods and the woods would be a good safe to place to be I can't go right now so I have to resign myself to doing videos that I can do at home and I'll save up a number of videos for when the woods are open again and we can get out and share that together okay now the backstory on this stove is this was loaned to me by a friend of mine Wayne from kojiki life and I'll put a link to Wayne's channel up here in the corner because Wayne has a great youtube channel not a big channel but a growing channel he's busy right now these days with work so he doesn't get out to make as many videos as he would like to but I'm sure at some point he will get back out into the woods and I think you'll appreciate his content so Wayne and I met up for coffee some time ago and he loaned me the stove he said let me know what you think of this maybe if you'd like to do a video of it so it's not my stove I didn't pay for it but it wasn't given to me as a gift so I owe nobody anything for this stove okay I am going to set the stove up here on my in my back yard so that you can see the stove or talk about it and we'll get a fire going in it okay here's what the stove looks like when you receive it from China so this stove is available on eBay on Amazon on Aliexpress I'll provide a few links in the show notes below they sometimes will come brand it with either PS kook or Licata but most of the time I believe they come unbranded so let's open this up and assemble it I'll give you a few dimensions of it and a few observations before we get to building a fire in it so as you can see it's quite a bulky stove I didn't measure this thickness but I'm going to estimate it I will measure it and put it in the show notes but I'm gonna estimate that at an inch maybe an inch and a half through here so it's quite bulky in this direction setup is fairly simple there is a few tricks to it such as make sure you take out the top grate and the ash pan which dropped down aside on me here we go take that out if folds open there is a great inside hopefully you can see that dropping down and that's your fire grate the wood will sit on the ash pan comes in from the side either side it doesn't require one side or the other it's not fitted in very tight but it will sit in there quite well and this little grate will sit on top and you when you build a fire okay that's the basic assembly of the stove one of the feature that is unique well a couple of other features one is that's quite unique on this one is the feed port so there is actually a hinged door with a little kind of a lock for a feed port that you can open up and feed quite long sticks in there are two handles on either side they're a little finicky to get into play but for the best of my estimation these handles can be used to move the stove when it is burning however having said that I'm not sure I'd want to do that with my hands that close to the stove you may get away with with leather gloves I haven't tried it I think probably I would use a couple of sticks couple of sticks with notches in them to grab the stove if I had to move it I will say this right now though if you think that at some point during the burn you're going to have to move the stove make sure that these are extended prior because if they're down inside and they will slide down there you can see like that I doubt when this you're using a pair of pliers well you can see how finicky they are they actually will come out of their spot not my favorite feature of the stove in fact if this were my stove I'd likely remove them all together because I I think they get in the way more than anything else alright let's look at a couple of dimensions on this stove and then I'm going to show you some comparisons because I think it's important to show you where I think the design originated so the overall height ground to top is eight and a quarter inches and I'll be putting all these measurements with their metric comparisons in the show notes as well so eight and a quarter to the top it is five and a half inches wide it is square so it is quite a wide big stove it is also five and a quarter inches deep in the burn chamber down to where the grate is it weighs one pound 13 ounces all right this is quite a big stove but those numbers don't mean a lot unless I give you something to compare them against so let's bring over my firebox stove so here's my well-loved well-used firebox stove and if you look at them side-by-side they're close but not quite that close the the firebox is a little bit smaller all the way around in size and it's also heavier I just have to reach over for my notes but I believe yes the firebox is two pounds two ounces so if it's half again almost 1/3 or two-thirds again is heavy not quite twice as heavy but it's considerably heavier than the this stove is the Chinese stove I think where people often refer to this as the China the Chinese firebox is because of the fact that it is a folding stove and it has a removable ash plate like the firebox does then get that back in place and it has a drop-down fire grate for the wood to sit on so it does have those things in common however when I looked at this I thought it had more common more in common with a different stove not the firebox and that is the bushbox from Germany now this is the LF model so it is the smaller model as you know there's an Excel version of the fire bar or the bush box that is approximately the same size as the firebox but the reason I'm showing you that this is the only one of the bushbox series that I own at this time so the reason I'm showing you this is because I think there's more inspiration comes from this stove then does from the fire box so the way that the bush box works it's also a folding stove and it folds inwards on the sides and collapses down so that when you open it up inside you have a ash plate that drops down and a fire grate that drops down so you can see the two of them inside of there the feed port is raised it's a little bit different than it is on the firebox of course and that's what I'll have to take the ash pan out this Chinese one has that same similarity and design in that the sides fold inwards as it collapses up so I think the inspiration again is more closely related to the bush box than it is the fire box having said that it doesn't have a name what are you gonna call it well I guess you could call it the Chinese fire box you could call it the Chinese bush box how about the Chinese Bush fire I'm not suggesting that I'm just trying to come up with a name for it okay so there's the basic design of the stove it does have some quirks when you go to use it that I want to share with you as I load it with wood and a few things that if this was my stove I think I would do to modify it to make it work even better actually one of the things I'm going to show you right now because it's not something I'm going to be able to do but if this was my stove I would do this to it and that is this is not going to work with wood pellets not without a whole lot of modification some type of a big screen in the bottom there because obviously all your pellets are going to drop down through so that is one thing that I won't be trying in the stove but the other thing is if this was my stove I would take my Trangia make some measurements from the Trangia the height of the stove and that one inch to one and a quarter inch and I would drill a series of holes through the sides of this so that I could run skewers through to set a pot on as long as the pot is smaller in diameter than is the the stove itself if you want to use it with the pot on top of the stove then that's what the second set of holes and skewers would do would allow you to raise the Trangia right up to the the exact height that you wanted to so yeah it wouldn't be too difficult to drill some holes in this the gauge steel is lighter than the firebox by a good margin but having said that it's still quite a sturdy stove I'm not complaining about the sturdiness of it all one thing I will say right up front before we get going but the fire is that I'm don't know what to think about this door because quite often it doesn't take much force to fall open I've noticed that especially when there's wood inside that this is not what you call a snug fit and not that this is a big deal but it's also because it's not a snug fit I've had seen flames shooting up the side here not a fire risk just a I guess you might say a waste of heat because it's not going to come in contact with your parts for shooting up they're getting this open can be a big fish creek as well so that's the way it'll sit if you can keep the ring out that's great if not if the ring lays flat you're going to need some way of getting a hold of the ring to turn it because you're not going to do that with your hands a pair of pliers again if you have your leather mentor another pair of pliers or stick with a notch on it you'd be able to open that up alright now I'm going to break away fill this full of wood and we'll set up and run a burn on it I'll show you some of the attributes some of the quirks with it when it's actually while operating okay so I've got the stove preloaded with wood and a vertical stack and I'm going for a top down burn not with all that wood it'll be interesting I'll do a general time and luck looking for specific at times but I'll do a general time to see just how low long it'll run like that but I expect that this is going to give me a huge blazing fire that's been my experience with I've used it a few times now in the woods had some good experiences with it so - like this today yeah still using some of that commercial fire starter by my lighter here we'll get that lit some wood chips on it because of course you have to kind of get it get that going for a bit before it'll really take off I do have a pot of water that I'll be putting on to show you it's not a large pot but it is a 13 centimeter pot because I think this with a stove this size so you can go up to quite a quite a large pot on it you know it's got a good volume so it should work out with larger pots as well in fact it's a bit of an overkill for small pots wood chips from curving projects to get the top of the burn going and I'll probably have to cut away in a second to give this a chance to really kick caught up and then then I'll show you some of the interesting things about the stove it's not a lot of wind here today but there's a little bit so I do have a windscreen again I'm not looking for a boil time I'm just looking to show you the operation of the stove so what I'll do is that starting to catch is I will turn the camera back on in a few minute when the wood inside is really well caught and then we'll talk about how the other stove functions so it's been about five minutes since I lit the top of the wood and the fire is sinking down nicely into the wood all the wood pretty much all the wood is engaged now so it'd be at this point if not sooner that I would have put the grate on that comes with this so that I can get a pot of water on so here's the grate that comes with now I'm using a pair of pliers because I don't have my leather gloves handy but this is what comes with and that sits right down kind of kind of just nicely if you can get it on properly I probably could have put it on as soon as I lit the stove would have been a little easier there we go now sitting on so you know I I really think that this would be a great stove for use with charcoal so make this a folding chair coal stove yeah this I think this would work really well especially with that great you could grill something right on top of that great but it is also intended to be a pot stand and I have my doubts but the long-term durability of it to start with but more importantly watch what happens when I put a pot on now the last time I did this it was a slightly water diameter pot but you can see how clean and efficiently the wood is burning right now but when I put the pot on you can see smoke and that's not uncommon for stove when you start to cut off some of the airflow at the top it's of course it's going to smoke but with a larger pot which this stove can easily handle you can virtually cut off all the oxygen or all the exhaust coming up through so right now you can see the flames are moving up around the outside of the pot nicely with some smoke but not a lot which is acceptable but again with a larger pot it's a bit of an issue because you're cutting up all the airflow now Wayne the owner of the stove my friend Wayne also recognized this issue so he came up with a workaround solution that I'll share with you now take the pot off take the grill off and can see how cleanly it's burning right now by the way this is gonna go through wood incredibly quick with incredibly hot fire and one of the reasons I believe that's the case is because there's so much airflow coming through that grate the grate I showed you the far grate to hold the wood in my opinion the holes in it are just way way too big it's allowed too much air to travel through not only is it allowing too much air to come up through it's also allowing too many of the hot coals and ash to fall down underneath now it does have that ash pan but a cross-breeze could drag some of that out through the sides of it so I don't consider this dangerous because of course you are still going to use all the same safety precautions you would with any wood stove or any open fire but where you set it up I just think that the great inside could use smaller holes maybe even as small as that or maybe even a little bit smaller so what it Wayne come up with well he took two pieces of steel metal bars they are just over 1/2 inch and not quite three quarters of an inch wide he notched them and on each end with a dremel tool and he knots the sides of the stove itself so that he could mate them up and let's see if I can do this without not easily this folding nature of the sides of this stove make it such that little fiddling sometimes it's necessary all right I think I've got it on there more or less the way it's intended I don't think I have it quite right but I think it'll work well enough for demonstration purposes so what we've done is we have the stove or the top bars are raising up not up not a whole lot probably a quarter inch or so but let's put this back on look how much less smoke is being produced around the outside of the pot still some yes but a whole lot less and that's because we have created more area around the base of the pot for the exhaust of smoke and air so what do we have in the design of the stove is a bit of a mismatch between the inflowing air and the outgoing air Wayne's two little pieces of metal are working if this was my stove I think I would probably have used that Walmart $1.00 stainless steel ruler and cut it into sections so that I could have got a little bit more height yet not an issue with this part again only a 13 centimeters but if you're talking about a large part light the path under Bush pot which is 14 centimeters or the 14 centimeters zebra pot it pretty much covers the whole top of the stove and you get a lot more smoke so raising it off the bar off at the top of the stove makes a huge difference I think also like I mentioned I would put something in the bottom to ACLU's some of the airflow now one of the things I want to do wow this is sitting here but I got to tell you there producing a lot of heat this would make a nice campfire stove something that you could sit around and actually warm yourself up with with a lot of wood all that wood it's still going no feeding necessary but when it gets time to feed it then you can see the fire is just halfway down the wood right now but you can get in some pretty long sticks or if you want to have a less intense fire start with a much smaller one in the base and then feed it in through the sides here close that up this is a bit tricky now if you didn't bring your pliers with you your Leatherman or something else you could still do that if you made a little notch stick or a little stick with a little Y branch on the bottom of it to do that with you know somebody common in one of my other videos that they thought I was too close to the the stove in terms of the heat and my camera rest assured I'm about five feet above the stove I just used the telephoto lens to get you a better view inside that is one raging fire down the side there there's a lot of heat being produced even at this five feet distance I'm still feeling the heat not enough to melt plastic or anything but hot enough to keep me warm that is a lot of heat coming out of that top of that stove all right now I have to wait for this stove to burn through cool down I'll give you an idea about how long it ran with that little load of wood and we'll close up with a few thoughts all right well the stove ran for about 20-25 minutes on that load of wood which is actually pretty good it was a big pile of wood though so you know much more than most of the other stoves I have will hold so yeah one of the things I did notice I probably could have taken some video of is I could see down inside the stove as the fire was not dying down and burning down into coals how many of the coals had dropped through that big grate onto the screen below onto the the grate that plate underneath so it's it's a very good thing that that plate is there because had they dropped on to a combustible surface you know it could have been a real problem but that be that as it may it does work I did have ashes blowing out from under it so for you were exposing the stove to a strong wind from the side you could lose some of those hot coals Oh from underneath it so as I mentioned before regular safe fire practices apply to this as they do to wall stoves for that matter so a couple thoughts on this I'm not if you're gonna be able to see this but it is warping a little bit but you know functionally it's not changing anything and I think that's maybe - the loose tolerances the reason why it's not going to change the function of the stove it does work a little bit like that if aesthetically it's not pleasing it's not as convincing in terms of durability as maybe the firebox stove is but you know what as I look at the plates yes I can see a little bit of warping but that whole folding design seems to negate any negative effects that it has on him so what do I like about it well one thing I'd like to put it right up front and clearly is the price it is not an expensive stove you can get these for around $25 Canadian and I like I said I'll put a few links in the show notes below if you want to check them out I like the fact that it's stainless steel I like the volume this is a huge stove it's not an everyday stove this may be one you want to carry when there's two or even three people and you do have to do some volume boiling the water may be melting of snow or may be using it as a charcoal I think does it make a great charcoal almost like a hibachi type of a thing that you could use those are probably the things I like most about it what do I dislike about it it feels finicky to me like it doesn't feel like it's going to be stable over the long term I don't see anything deteriorating I've had five six fires in it Wayne's had a number of fires in it so it may not have the long-term durability of a firebox but still I think it's gonna last long enough especially for that cost there's a few things I really am not fans of and one of these little handles I think I mentioned that I can only imagine are they're for picking the stove up while it's hot I think I'd get rid of those right away if the if you if I bought this for myself I'm not a real fan of this door I can see the benefit of the idea of opening up and feeding some long sticks through yeah the door works for that but I'm not a fan of this lock I think would want to fiddle or modify that lock to make sure that it stays closed as I said it even had did happen I didn't catch on a camera but the door as the wood moved around as it sank down aside as a burn the door flopped open and that was because it just happened to hit thee I don't know if I can even get it to do it just kind of hit the catch on side and down it it dropped so maybe some slight bending might be in order here just to make sure that it's it's tightened you actually had to make a concerted effort to open it I really just like that large grate inside I think that it does a couple of things that are negative one allows too many of the hot coals to pass through and primarily it allows too much hot air or too much air to enter through the wood so it's burning it excessively fast excessively hot also from the design standpoint I'm not a fan of that little grill that goes on top okay if I'm grilling something over charcoal but if I want to use this fire for boiling water or frying on top of something like a pan or a pot I think there has to be some height added to it so Wayne's idea of adding those two little bars is right on the money I think I would use something a little taller yet so I can get at least a half inch three quarters of an inch clearance underneath whatever vessel I have on top of it okay I think I've kind of gone through the stove pretty clearly if you have any questions or any comments on these you know please put them in the in the comments section below maybe one comment I will add to this is you know this stove and the one from PS cook the folding one that opens like a book they seem to come on the market about the same time and they seem to be similar in nature there's a big difference between the two of them I guess if I was to choose one over the other if you're kind of saying I think I'd like to buy an inexpensive stove which one do I buy buy this one I just think it's closer to a fully functional stove with no modifications necessary you can do a lot with this it folds up to a both the same size same weight so yeah this one just has a little bit more going for it than the other one does even with any of the negatives that I mentioned I think they're quite easily overcome okay that's everything I'm going to say both this stove so I'm in my backyard and it looks like I will be four the foreseeable future I do have videos I can do from here and unless something changes and I can get out in the woods then I'm going to be doing more videos from home if you have any comments on that or any videos you think I could do at home that you might be of interest to all of you please put those in the comments section below and rather than my normal closer I think what I'll say at this time is please everybody stay safe follow all the guidelines for hand-washing and social distancing stay safe let's get ahead of this and make sure we don't lose anybody unnecessarily to it bye for now

Channel: Mark Young

Views: 35,467

Keywords: Mark Young, Shunpyke Bushcraft, bushcraft, woodscraft, survival, hiking, fishing, camping, hunting, foraging, DIY, homemade, make it yourself, cooking, plant identification, wild medicinals, medicinal, twig stove, hobo stove, camp stove, firecraft, camp cooking, folding wood stove

Id: g4uxy0z_DZQ

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020