Hey guys,
I want to heat a garage, that has a chimney, but no stove...
Any of you all have any experience building a stove? What do I need?
I have a farm dump I can rummage through, so I was thinking about maybe getting a drum, adding legs so that it would sit on it's side, cutting a door, adding hinges, and buying some stove pipe...
Will this do it? What do you think?
Marion
Marion, I've got most of the work done on one and will be finishing it up in a couple days. I'll post up pics. Here's a description until then.
I wanted to go cheap, extremely simple, and as efficient as possible. Didn't give a hoot about looks.
Materials: 2 55 gal open top barrels with matching ring distances (need to be measured if your buying them from a dump) with one lid and clamp.
Choose your outer barrel and cut your stovepipe hole on the side at the top. Cut it a bit small and bend it out with pliers. Insert an elbow or pipe section to act as a collar and cut slits in the inside portion to make tabs and bend them out to hold the pipe. Now hammer the part you bent out on the barrel back down to lock it in place.
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Take the other barrel and cut the top and bottom rims off. Save the bottom.
Now cut it in half lengthwise. Cut the bottom 1/3 off one half under the bottom ring and an inch or so off the top. Do the same to the other, but leave a few inches on each side of the bottom on this one.
Take the half with the extra material at the bottom and insert it into your outer barrel with your stovepipe opening in the middle. Pull it out so there's a space between the back of it and the outer barrel, but the ends of the half still touch the outer barrel. Stick a log or something behind it to hold it in place, and put a couple bolts through the extra steel at the bottom.
Take the other half and insert it the same, but on the other side, overlapping ends with the first half. Wedge it in place, and bolt the outer barrel and the two halves together. Should be mostly airtight now.
You should now have, what looks like a large steel eye from the top facing the pipe..
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Take the bottom that you cut off the inner barrel and cut out pieces to cover the two openings you now have between the inner halves and the outer barrel. Bolt them in place with L brackets or whatever.
Seal the cracks in these, the stovepipe hole, and the joined edges of the inner halves with stove caulk, muffler cement, whatever.
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Now, on the upper side exactly opposite the stovepipe, drill six one inch holes (or three two inch, or slots, or anything that adds to the pipe diameter) and make a sliding cover or something to go over them from your scrap pieces. This is your air intake.
Cut a square on the bottom stovepipe side of the outer barrel and add a door with another small air intake. This is your cleanout door/secondary air intake.
Put a few inches of sand or gravel at the bottom.
Done.
Sounds more complicated than it is, and welding would be helpful but not necessary. You can also add a door for feeding from the side, but I'm not gonna.
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Here's how it
should work. Wood is loaded from the top by simply removing the lid. You can just stack it in if ya want.
Fire burns mainly at the bottom with your air coming in at the bottom of one inner half and exiting at the other. Any smoke that escapes the coals and travels up will have to come back down through the coals and be hit with secondary air as it moves into the baffled half and out the stovepipe. This should cause nearly complete combustion leading to much more heat and little if any smoke from the chimney.
As the wood at the bottom burns, the rest will fall into place like a big hopper. This has the added advantage of letting you use green wood at the top as it should dry on it's way down to the combustion pit.
I think that's it. Not the perfect solution maybe, but it should be good for what it costs me (nothing).
