DIY Wood Gas Backpacking Stove

hey everyone it's David with David's passage comm and today I'm coming to you with another stove build video in a couple weeks I'm heading to Iowa Royale and one of the things they don't like you doing so much as making fires everywhere so what I'm going to do is I'm going to build actually a Wood gasification stove this is this type of stove is very very efficient yeah burning the wood that you put in it and there's all kinds of really great resources on how to build one of these and the the technology has been around for eons but there are some particular articles that I found really really handy and the one that I'm thinking of off hand is the one at the ultimate hang com if you get a chance to go over there they've got a really cool step-by-step tutorial on how to build it and so the one I'm going to build is going to be similar to theirs and so I thought I'd take you along for the ride while I build it and then we'll do a little burn test with it but basically you're going to need you know a few few things first of all you're gonna need a quart paint can okay this is just a I bought this at Home Depot for 53 bucks you're going to need a Progresso soup can you're going to need a tunafish can also it's really handy to have one of these this is a stepper bit I'll be using this to make holes in it it's also really handy to have a dremel tool for this with a cut-off wheel reason why I say that's hand you're not to have all of this stuff if you have some other way to do what we're going to do but for drilling you know 3/4 inch size holes you might just find a stepper bit to be the easiest thing you're also going to need some hardware cloth this is a mesh cloth you can buy at most hardware stores now I will say this as a caveat is that sometimes this is galvanized you need to make sure it's better to not use galvanized wire if you can or you know from what I've read and understand you can burn it off but you don't want to cook with it until you've burned the galvanization off or whatever for the first few times because galvanized metal is the the fumes of it are toxic and so you'd want to do that but we are going to use hardware cloth I don't know that this is galvanized or not you have to be careful and so just as a precaution I'm going to burn this few times through not only to test the stove but just to make sure that I'm not getting any craziness in my food so start on the open side of the can what I did was I marked eight evenly spaced marks I just eyeballed it but just as evenly as I could I marked eight marks then on the side I went ahead and drew a line it's just a little bit more than halfway about five-eighths inch from the top of the can and then at those marks I put a little cross so I can know where my where my bit is going to go in the next thing I'm going to do is just taking my screwin hammer I'm going to tap in some just some starter holes just to guide the bit I'm going to use here just going to lightly do this just enough so there's a hole that will keep the bit on target now if you have an awesome shop with all kinds of vices and and tools and such I would strongly suggest that you do this in there I'm ignoring a lot of safety precautions right now in order to bring you this video but the next step that I'm going to do I'm using a croquet mallet for a sort of brace here to keep it there and I'm using this stepper bit and I'm going to take it just down to eleven sixteenths for now but I'm just going to get this thing started I think the key here is to hold it gently so that you don't you're not shoving it into the can you just want to hold it gently so that you don't dent your your can up right now to start well while I'm on this you know croquet thing I'm just bringing it in about a quarter inch I'll go all the way around and do that first now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take I took it off the little croquet mallet bench and a wide into each one of these holes - I'm going to start with eleven sixteenths I may go as high as 3/4 but I'm going to see if I can get away with eleven sixteenths first I'm going to take this real slow so that I can I don't den up this can while I'm doing it that's point the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to take this Progresso soup can sit it on top of that paint can try to get a real close to center that's pretty good no take my permanent marker here and trace around that so that's right up to that candid if we can kind of see that so the next step in this process I'm just going to use sort of the cut off wheel of my with my Dremel and I'm going to remove most of this material just shy of probably I'm going to say a little more than a quarter-inch so I'm going to start to cut this this out this hole out I'm not going to the line yet I'm just cutting everything else out for now and you'll see why in a little bit next I'm gonna do is just take a bit of a grinding piece my Dremel and clean up those edges I don't like any sharp edges even those edges are gonna be exposed just think it leaves for sloppy work so okay so now it's back to the cutoff wheel and what I'm going to begin to do now is we made that remember we made that permanent marker line all the way around I'm going to start to cut slits in just to that line not into the line beyond the line at the end of the line just inside that line like that now what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a ton of these going around the can just a ton of these all along the edge going right to that one okay that's done for now now on to the next second step and I'm just going to set this side of cane for a bit and move on to this can this is our Progresso soup can what I'm going to do again is just take my my permanent marker and I'm going to make eight eight marks okay across from each other and then correspondingly put eight dots in here and then drill those out just like I did the paint can in the beginning nothing to scientific here I'm just eyeballing it now I'm going to put it right in the middle here between this line and the rim just going down from the dot and just just eyeballing and I don't think there's an exact science to it you can see that dot there next I'm going to go back to my little croquet set up here with my hammer and just a screw and just put the put a little pilot hole in there before I draw those out got those done now I'm going back to the stepper bit this time I'm going to make the hole a bit smaller probably only going to 3/8 again I'm going to kind of keep this slow so I don't debt my can up as I do this we got those downloads all three eighths and shoals and then just going going along inside and just kind of picking up any burrs I see just to make sure you have anything but on one there all right this next step is where things kind of start to finally come together and you have to do is see if this can into this camp now you may have to make some adjustments but generally these tabs will start to push down you can actually maybe help them out a little bit to begin with just to kind of get the process started and you're going to just kind of gently seat this can down inside inside of you just going to want to wiggle around on you that's okay you're a nice snug fit it's pretty snug if you wanted to make it more permanent you could put some jb weld around here but it shouldn't fall out then there needs to be some airflow that can get to here so what I'm going to actually do is cut off a portion of this just so it goes above these holes because you want airflow to be able to go underneath I ended up cutting off the bottom here and just cleaning up those burrs but then also I put four slits in the side where my hardware cloth is going to go so now you see if we if I seat it once I seat it down the air holes are going to be a gift to get be able to get up underneath where the fire and combustion chamber is what I'm going to do is take this piece of hardware cloth and cut it into a circle just bigger than the can okay so now that I've got this just bigger than the outside what I want to do is fashion in such a way that that it will be held in place by these slots here and then trim off the excess and be careful these sharp edges all right there she is you know now whatever is sticking out here I'm just going to bend now we can see that there we go okay last step is really just let's to make the pot stand back to the step drill first thing we're going to do is cut several 3/8 inch holes around this I would say probably tenner or so using the same methods as before all right next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to cut in this just to this line on this tunic and lid okay so you definitely want to clean this up because this part you're going to actually come in contact with quite a bit so I'm going to make sure that all of these burrs are off this is my pot stand so what I want to be able to do is have a little opening here along this can somewhere where I can feed wooden from the top so I'm just going to cut a square right in there okay cut the holdout and as far as I'm concerned now this is complete the only thing is left is to test it so let's get some wood and do that one of the neat things I hear about this type of stove is just the type of fuel that it uses and you can just literally pick up just these small sticks off the ground and use those to start your fire and so I've done that all this really small stuff so if it's real dry and real snappy then I've seen people like these a few different ways I'm actually just going take my lighter and light it from the bottom side what has to happen are these set of these sticks need to catch and you'll notice you see a lot of smoke now when I understand once the gasification process starts you're not going to notice much smoke in fact what I'm already noticing right now you can see these sort of jets coming up out of the pot and the smoke is already starting to dissipate quite a bit you can see this or not what's happening is the fire inside creates smoke the air that's getting sucked up from the bottom it's getting superheated in the walls when it comes out those holes on the side the superheated air superheated smoke catches on fire and completely burns up the wood there's no smoke back if I bring it back now you can see there's no smoke on that thing and if you look close you can see the flames pouring out of those holes find more wood and they're probably better and this is the thing I kind of hear people complain about a bit is is getting this thing to stay lit or at least getting used to getting enough sticks in there it's one of those type of stoves from what I understand you got a kind of babysit a little bit just sort of keep feeding it but I mean using that much wood to cook with to me isn't all that big of a deal you know I could pick that much up and just shove it in my pocket not a big deal at all let's do a boil tests on this you've got 2 cups of water on standby where you see if I've got enough wood to boil 2 cups of water on this guy alright so here we go here's a test I'll start at that timer let's see if I can get this thing a boil and we'll have to keep feeding this and I can already tell but you know what sure would be having to carry 2 pounds of fuel with you for a week a little tour of things here you can kind of see those jets coming out that's the wood gas pumping out of there you know because it's wood I fully expect to be very unpredictable in terms of its cooking ability not getting smoke the fuel is free fuels ultra lightweight still ways a little bit ways definitely weighs more than the Fancy Feast stove Wow no smoke that's amazing you know there was a little bit I'm not going to lie and say there was no smoke but until you know it just sort of takes a little bit for the thing to get warmed up in the gasification process to start once that does though you know no smoke comes out of anything that's below those those inner holes there alright for nine minutes and we've got a boil nine minutes now definitely not as fast as an alcohol stove but the benefits to using something like this you don't have to carry your fuel with you my idea is to use a combination of this and alcohol so that I can have a fuel source a way to cook you know wherever I'm at that's how you make a wood gas backpacking stove works out pretty nice if you like this there's some other videos on how to build some neat stuff as I learn how to build it I mean again one of the best tutorials I saw for making one of these came from the ultimate hang komm I definitely suggest to check out their website for information on how to make one of these you know and it just gets gets more of the science behind it they had a really great article on there about wood gas stove so definitely go check that out also there's some other YouTube videos out there that show you how to make these two that are really good definitely check those out but in the meantime just appreciate all your likes comments support and we'll see you in the next video and take care

Channel: David's Passage

Views: 323,337

Keywords: outdoors, hiking, backpacking, bushcraft, bushbuddy, camping, bush buddy, wood gas, gasification, backpacking stove, camping stove, firebox stove, woodgas, wood gas stove, wood gasification stove, wood gasifier, ultralight backpacking, lightweight backpacking, DIY, D.I.Y., Do It Yourself (Hobby), how to, how-to, rocket stove, rocketstove, solo stove, solostove, BushBuddy Ultra, hiking stove, alcohol stove, stick stove, SilverFire, davidspassage, David's Passage

Id: ZP0wISEJGmo

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 12 2014