The Impossible Fire pit Tornado

hey guys backyard scientist here you know what's pretty cool fire tornadoes so i'm pretty jealous of california right now because california is lit there's fire tornadoes everywhere meanwhile in florida i couldn't start a fire if i tried just watch just wait just wait it might take a while but it's not going to spread i told you so in today's video we're going to be making a fire pit that's always constantly making a fire tornado and as an added bonus everybody hates to have fires because you get covered in smoke right so we're going to try to make a fire pit that produces no smoke and a constant fire tornado they do make these commercial fire pits which claim to produce no smoke but the problem is number one no fire tornado number two they're 400 bucks for a fire pit 400 for a fire pit that's pretty ridiculous so i decided to buy 400 worth of steel to try to make my own okay so we just finished unloading all of this metal and i got a message on discord that says why don't you try making a fire tornado like you did in your previous video just take two half circles offset them a little bit and the fire on the inside will draw in air and make a perfect fire tornado i kind of wish i thought of this before i just bought 400 worth of steel but whatever thankfully i also just picked up two months ago two water heaters that were laying on the side of the road so that'll be perfect we'll just open up the water heaters cut them in half and see if we can make a fire tornado easy peasy all we had to do is cut the ends off the water heater and then cut it in half [Music] high score all right i'm gonna make a nice little fire here to make sure it all catches not doing much of a fire tornado what do you think any fire tornado at all maybe a little okay i'm seeing some circular rotation so this is working better than i thought it would there's still you know there's some rotation to it but it's still making a lot of smoke and uh it's really throwing ash all over the place okay so back to the original idea the plan for this fire pit is to well i've already cut out 32 of these fins and now what we're going to do is arrange them in a circle and offset the angle a little bit so when it sucks air and it makes a fire tornado the problem though is i don't know which angle will create the best fire tornado and because i'm scared of commitment i'm going to weld little pins on the end of each one of these blades so we can adjust and see which angle creates the best fire tornado building this was pretty straightforward but there was just a lot of busy work i had to cut out 32 of those fins and then two rings to hold the fins next i had to drill 32 holes and weld on 64 pins now it's time to assemble it so now i have cut out and assembled 32 of these fins right here so now we just have to assemble them on this you're going to have to hold up on that yeah get that one in while i pry it up yep you let down and okay we did one all right so we got everything nice and assembled the gap is really thin here you can see that there's only like quarter of an inch or less between these slats for air to get in so that should spin everything up really nice and we don't have any firewood we have a bunch of leaves which we already proved don't burn so we've hooked up the propane tank right here so uh why don't you turn it on let's see oh that's tornadoing pretty good whoa that's working pretty good yeah wow okay so that's that's definitely working look at the leaves it's working but i think it's too far down right now because you know by the time it gets up there's no more fuel left all right so let's turn this off and bring that ring of fire up a little bit more and see what happens i'd say it's working somewhat but the problem is it gets pushed together and then it comes right back out right on top i don't even know if it's possible to get a tall fire tornado but we're definitely getting some nice uh vortical action in here so far the first two fire pits each have their own pros and cons the first design was really simple and there was some tornado action going on with the flame but it threw a lot of ash around and it wasn't exactly smokeless the second design here made a really nice smokeless fire tornado but it was trapped on the inside of the fire pit now my next idea is to make a fire pit like those fancy commercial ones but instead have something on top that'll spin the flame into a fire tornado all of those fancy 400 fire pits i showed you earlier all work on the same principle when you light a fire in one of these fire pits it heats up the wall on the inside layer of the fire pit and then after a couple of minutes the walls on the inside get really hot which heats up the air next to it the hot air rises and mixes with the fire adding in extra oxygen and burning away all the smoke this one should be really easy to make i can make it with the water heater that i found on the side of the road but there's one problem i already cut it in half you know what this means maybe we'll cut this montage just a little short all right i've got the two water heaters on top of each other and because i had to weld them together they weren't perfectly circular anymore so i kind of had to clamp everything together with these clamps here to squeeze it and make it a circle again but now i can't get this clamp out i just had to remove the clamp with an angle grinder and then beat this thing into submission it was really hard so now that we've got this thing assembled we need a way to spin the flame so i welded up this and it kind of looks like a giant impeller blade or something and it's going to sit on top of here so when the air comes up between the two layers it'll hit this and hopefully spin the air and spin the fire the problem is this will only fit in here one way and i didn't mark it all right all right guys the fire pit is complete it's all assembled so now i'm going to load it with some kindling and just some regular yard waste and stuff and see if we can get a fire tornado if you remember how this works it's going to take a while for the inside wall to heat up to start sucking in the air and mixing it up on top of the fire and when it starts mixing in that's going to give us a fire tornado the problem is it never started to work i think the problem is that for the amount of wood that you need to put in to get a tall flame there's just not enough oxygen that can get in this to create enough flames to create a fire tornado so instead i'm gonna hook up some propane gas crank that sucker up and see if we can get a fire tornado whoa i didn't need that arm here anyway so if i do turn it up you can see that it is spinning around a little bit so the little slats angled on there are doing something i mean overall i would say that this is a success with the propane but that's kind of cheating if you're having a campfire right lugging around a bunch of propane instead of just throwing some wood in the fire okay i want to try one more thing going back to the first fire tornado experiment i want to try this with a little bit of alcohol and gasoline instead of wood and logs all right so what i have here is just an old dryer drum and we're going to light this on fire back away really fast and see if we can get a fire tornado come on fire come on trying to do an outro here work well i would say that this is the best fire tornado that we've had so far and it's also the cheapest isn't that how it always works looking back on this video i think that there's a reason that my fire tornado didn't work it's because nobody else has made a fire tornado that's always constantly going without any extra air input or moving blades or anything like that i just don't think it's possible because once the fire tornado gets above the fire pit it just disappears like that in order for fire tornadoes to work in nature there needs to be really specific set of circumstances that you just can't replicate on a small scale like this i still challenge anybody to try to make their own fire tornado that doesn't use any moving parts you can just have in a backyard this is using gasoline so it's kind of cheating and you know it gets dirty and smelly so i don't think that this counts so uh thanks for watching guys see you next time bye

Channel: TheBackyardScientist

Views: 1,681,176

Rating: 4.8817296 out of 5

Keywords: fire tornado, fire pit, diy, backyard scientist, the backyard scientist, bakyard science

Id: Zuc7OzAi-oc

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020