How to make a backpacking oven!

hey everybody dustin here from backcountry cuisine and today we're making an ultralight oven for backpacking i know [Music] [Music] all right so um years ago there was a company called outback oven they made this really cool contraption where you had this dome you could put over top of your your frying pan so they got a fry pan from them lid flange spreader and heat disperser and then a riser bar put that on top you put the dome [Music] like so like that bam and you were you were cooking in an oven but you can backpack with it and make amazing meals so pretty cool problem is outback oven went out of business as i figured out how to make it out of material called carbon felt this is stuff that plumbers use to totally flame proof it's awesome it's really good and so we're going to make one out of that because it won't melt right because i use any other kind of fabric it's going to melt all right let's get to it so the first thing you need to do is to make the heat spreader and the riser bar and you got a couple options actually for that first one is to just make a heat spreader it does pretty good so if you do this you just put your pan right on top of the heat spreader and that will slow the transfer of heat keep you from burning the bottom of your baked good before the top is cooked because that's the problem is that usually you don't have enough heat up on top to bake the the uh the food the cake or whatever before the bottom is is what i've made before is one of these and this comes from a can of neato and so i get the large can of powdered milk neato whole fat milk and this is great it's great stuff you can use in all kinds of recipes at home and on the trail i use it for all kinds of sauces and thickeners and soups and all kinds of things so this is a great product and then when it's all empty you've got a great lid here at the bottom i do strongly recommend that you get one of those safety can openers where they don't create this the jagged edges on them well does a couple things one it allows you to have this little lip on here so it gets you get a little more rigidity but you also get something that um kind of holds in place a little better and it doesn't you know obviously not going to cut you you don't want to have this in your backpack cutting through your back or your fingers as you go into digging for something you can use a regular can opener but you're gonna have to sand the edges and smooth them out and then it'll be a little more wobbly because it doesn't have this ridge that keeps it a little bit stiffer so up to you take this on amazon with something like 13 bucks 14 bucks something like that so there's a couple different versions out there take that take off your your lid bam there we go now i have my flame spreader so that's that's all that takes that part done next to make the riser part um the easiest thing to do is to get some little bolts tiny tiny little bolts i got a number six half inch bolts and and make sure you get the nuts and the bolts and you just drill a hole three holes tripods are always going to be stable if you do four then you might have some unevenness or tippiness to it so three works great drill a hole put your bolt through tighten up the nut and now you have a tripod that allows your pan to sit up away from it and what that does is it separates that heat even more so sure it's going to be the air is going to be really hot underneath this or on top of this but way less so than if the pan was straight on top like that so it just gives you a little bit more buffer a little bit less likely to burn the bottom of your pan or your baked good awesome all right so now we've got our flange spreader and right on it okay last and definitely the most complicated is to make the parka top that's going to go over top of your your pan and your lid you're going to sew little triangles six little triangles along one section of this piece of fabric so you have these little channels here where the air can come up and through and while it's doing that it's going to escape out the top you need a vent but it's going to keep that air really hot on top of the lid the basics of it you're going to take your carbon file and you're going to cut yourself a rectangle so it's an easy cut on this side what size rectangle you'll need well it depends on the size of your your pan and your lid so i'm going to walk you through i kind of come up with a little bit of an equation to help you with it the basics are that you're going to need to know the height of your pan and the lid you're going to need to know the height of the spacer so you need to know this total height you're going to need to have a little bit of space underneath that a little bit more fabric underneath that so that when the flame comes up and hits here it actually hits that side that's coming down far enough to come up and around so you need that plus you need the this part you're going to need this distance right here so that's going to come up over part of your lid then for the length for how how wide you want your rectangle that has to do with the circumference around your pan so let's do some let's do some math shall we all right so let's start off with the total height of the pan the lid and the spacer that i've got here so if i go all the way down to the bottom here and i measure up i'm looking at about three and a half ish inches not that important to be super exact but about three and a half inches there right so that's that's my height now i want to add at least one inch below that so that that fabric comes down below this spacer because again the flame is going to come up and hit that spread out i want it to hit the fabric and then come up the side so because that's three and a half i'm gonna go at least four and a half but i'm choosing to go five because i'd rather have a little bit more um sticking out underneath at the bottom so five inches for my height on this part of it all right so now i need to know how far it is from center to the outside and so i'm just going to again use the edge and i want to go all the way to the edge of my my lid not a pan you want to use the lid because usually the lid will stick out a little bit more than the pan does so i'm going to in fact this one's kind of wonky because it's a pipe handle and i'm going to look for another ish the the widest i've got and i'm looking at about four and a half inches into that center point and i want to have a little gap up on top here i want to have the the hole all right i want to have this this whole vent hole up at the top and i'd like that vent hole to be about two inches approximately two inches so if i have a four and a half here then if i go to three and a half it'll end up being about a two inch gap up on top so i'm going to go with three and a half inches i'm gonna go with five inches for my height three and a half for my width here so i know i need eight and a half total for the height of my material let's figure out the circumference here a couple ways to do it if you have a fabric tape you can wrap the fabric around that if you have a piece of string you can put your string around really hard to do you can also roll it and you can just roll it and actually need my pan in there gets me about 29 inches 29 inches all the way around that's not bad and the other way to do it is to do a diameter eight and three quarters so 8.75 and then multiply that by by 3.14 by pi that'll get you the circumference see i'm told you were doing math nice and i get 27 and a half all right so 27 and a half i think when i rolled it i got 29. so pretty close and i could feel my thing kind of slipping and sliding a little bit so that's not the best way to do it it's the rolly thing but you know somewhere between and a half and 29 so let's just say 28 something like that 28 29 but here's the key part you don't want it tight around the edges here you want space on either side you want to have air that can flow through it and at some point you've got to sew the ends together so you're going to take that rectangle you're going to wrap it around it to sew it so you need seam allowance on here too so if i say 28 i need to add at least a half inch for my seam for when i sew this up so i'm talking about at least 28 inches at least for that seam allowance then i want some gapage and what i basically found is if you add 10 percent of the width of that circumference excuse me 10 of that circumference that seems to give you enough gap if you've got a smaller pot you're not going to need as much extra so i can't just say use two inches or use three inches it's kind of a percentage based on how big the pan is so the pot is so in this case because this is 28 and a half let's call it 28 something like that i'm looking at 2.8 inches extra because that's 10 of 28 and a half ish and so i'm not gonna do 2.8 i could do two and three quarters extra inches or i could just do three inches i have not had issues with it being too wide really i mean you can get extreme right if i tried to put this thing on top of this pan and that's that's ridiculous but um it's better to be a little too big than it is to be a little too small because if it's too small it won't fit it wasn't like struggle to get it on and then you're to paint the butt so um because i've gotten 28 inches i'm gonna add an extra three inches 2.8 round up to three make my math easier so now instead of 28 i'm going with a 31 inch length 31 inch length for my rectangle all right now that you have your measurements you know how much to to order right so now you can order up your piece because they do come in different sizes and dimensions there are also two different thicknesses there's one that's about a quarter inch thick and this one's maybe an eighth maybe three sixteenths something like that i personally like the thinner one because it's less bulky in your pack but it's really not much more weight is it more efficient and heat wise maybe to have the thicker one maybe but i don't i don't actually think it's going to be that big a deal because it's more about the air that's flowing through than it is about holding in that air maybe i'm wrong but i think you're gonna be defined with the thinner one and it will pack down a little smaller so i'm going with thinner ones myself so i'm gonna do the eight and a half first um oh important thing to know is that it is not essential to get this exact there's there's nothing about exact again if anything i would go a little bit bigger a little bit larger than i would smaller because if it's too small you're going to have to start over again and that's a lot of material wasted measure your mark eight and a half is what i've got so i'm going to measure it in half there and then i'm going to measure eight and a half over here like that i'm using these little sewing clips they're super handy and really nice i like these a lot and then you just fold it on that edge double check that this is eight and a half here that's more like eight and a quarter so again anything i want to go a little bit on the big side fold that down try again there's eight and a half that looks like eight and a half and that's eight and a half so that feels good so now i can just clip these that's gonna hold it all in place while i'm using my scissors okay got my eight and a half tall now i'm going to cut it to 31 wide now it's time to make these little triangles these little pleats in here i have found that six works better than eight eight is too many and i'm thinking about breaking this up into six equal parts right six equal pleats then 31 we're looking at just over six inches right just barely over six inches but these two ends need to be three inches because i'm gonna have three on this side and three on this side so just kind of be markers going to be at three inches and then my next one will be at nine because i'm going three plus six one and when you look at it each of these should be just do a quick visual inspection make sure because i you know one time i did this i was off by an inch just because i wasn't adding correctly so just visually double check that these are look about right in terms of spacing and that these two at the end should be pretty close now for me you know this end over here is just a little bit long totally fine this does not have to be perfect in any mean any any regard at all so i said i wanted five inches here and three and a half here which is what i want so that's going to be my my part point to mark here i say okay that's five inches right there approximately three and a half inches there fold it on that and then i'm gonna mark measure up five inches all right so that's where i'm gonna that's where i'm gonna go to and then in terms of the height of it i found about an inch and a half seems to work well this height between where the sewing is going to end and that the end of that pleat is so it's about an inch and a half or so so now i have my my triangle points laid out what i'm going to do is i'm going to start sewing here and i'm going to sew over to this edge right here and now i just have to mark out all the rest of these an easy way to once you've got the first one measured you can just match it with the next one by folding it up to that point so that's a nice easy way to get your measuring done okay so now we've got all those same as we did before i can just make sure these are all lined up evenly at the bottom here and then i can just go through and and create a series of clips this way all right so let's talk thread i got two different types of thread because i just wanted to try and see which one was better i had i found some kevlar thread and that's what i made a couple of these out of is with kevlar thread and that worked great so far so good i haven't had any melting issues if you use regular thread it will melt so especially down here at the bottom where you have the hottest air coming by the and maybe sometimes even a flame will come and get it they'll they'll just melt or burn and then it comes separated like this still works and if you wanted to um you know you could just resell it every once in a while but um i wanted to use something that would actually last so i don't keep reselling but i have cooked with this even with this thing separated it still works and the rest of it doesn't seem to be on um be burning through so that's kind of cool and i probably made i don't know six breads or something like that with some one of these so something to think about this kevlar is really expensive um this was 10 bucks for this amount it's uh 50 yards so that's a lot of material a lot of thread you could certainly make several of these so you don't need that much and then i found the other one was nomex n-o-m-e-x and this is a tiny little bobbin of nomax thread um this nomex thread is quite a bit less i actually don't know how many probably maybe you know five or six yards maybe and um but it was like five bucks so it's cheaper but it's supposedly better um i haven't actually tried it this will be my first one i'm gonna use the nomex thread on this and see how it goes but um [Music] but it's pretty pretty spendy for just such a small amount of thread but if you're only making one of these maybe that's the way to go so nomex thread i've heard works great i have not tried personally but kevlar thread i know works so okay so you're going to want to get about two and a half to three feet of a piece of thread for this little just one little piece here two is probably fine but it might be a little short so two and a half three something like that okay one down five to go [Music] okay so i've got them all all the pleats sewn now so it's going gonna look something like this like a little skirt and now we're gonna bring it around and we're gonna sew this last little part in here and what ended up happening is now my hole at the top is way too big so not good enough um that's way too big it'll work but it it's not ideal so what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to take in a little bit of material at halfway between each one just a little bit and get that to get that hole to just close up a little bit around the top all right so i added in these little extra pleats in here just to take that hole in a little smaller make it a little smaller i could have even done more because it's still really relatively big so um but that's it that's how you do it you just i i've done this video three times now and um every time it comes out a little bit differently i can't figure out how to get these pleats to be consistent for me but you know it works that's really all it matters right so this is going to bake up something amazing i know it will work awesome so as long as you've got those little pleats so the air can go up through those channels and heat up the top of the lid and uh on your pan that's all that matters so um check it out try it out let me know how it goes if you have any questions put a comment down in the comment box so take care everybody and eat well [Music]

Channel: Backcountry Cuisine

Views: 234

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: NOLS, FlatCatGear, Batchstoves.com, MrBabelfish5, backpacking food, backpacking meals, backpacking recipes, bushcraft

Id: 48mflQl7lnk

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021