This articles was written by my Permie mate Don Lanham telling how he built a rocket stove to use for cooking on his property in Western NSW.
Why a rocket stove you ask, I happen to have a lot of twigs fall from trees around me and this is all that is needed to fire up the stove for a quick meal. I don’t need all those big logs you normally associate with an open fire and it burns so clean, without the risk of setting the surrounds alight.
On the other side, I work with metal and find certain bits and pieces laying around destined for the scrap bin. A good permie finds a way to reuse these sorts of things so from an old piece of 125mm pipe which used to water mushrooms and some bathroom floor off cuts when combined, make what you see here.
How to Make It
First I started with the old pipe and mitred the end at 45° and re-welded it to form a right angle. Using some off cuts off a flooring job, I’ve bolted the sides together with angle strips. Size was carefully calculated using the formula “use what you got”. The little piece of RHS (rectangular hollow section) you see on the bottom is just to make the pipe stand up during its initial trial, at the moment it’s inverted.
The lovely scalloped top ‘just happened’ so my billy would fit inside and still allow airflow around and up the sides. From another 2 equal length off-cuts of the pipe, I laid them in a piece of channel (to make straight lines) and marked out 4 equal sections in each, which were then slit with a skinny wheel on my little grinder, thus giving me 8 equal sections which when tacked together were the right diameter to insert my billy and looked quite cool too.
What insulation to use
Again using the formula from above“use what you got”, it was time to collect some dry grass and moist clay to make a mix. This was mixed together and placed inside the stove and rammed tight enough not to fall out when it came time to turn the stove back up the right way.
Now the heavy bit, turning it over. It’s so easy to push over but to stand it up the right way again I had to use a bar up the chimney for leverage and carefully pack some more mix on the ground to steady it in the vertical position. Note, this is not what you might call mobile but rather a fixture, an outdoor cooking centre.
There, done and tested, you should hear the stove when it fires up, sounds like a rocket as the air flow gets going up the chimney, hence its name.
You can see three little bolts on which the frying pan sits (giving free flow for the heat to surround and flow over the frypan) and the billy sits inside, or rather hangs by its handle over the hole collecting nearly all the heat exiting the chimney, a rather efficient cooking method.
As you can see by the times taken from photos, it cooked a damper, steak and eggs, all served up in under 30 minutes.
On another occasion, pot of vegies boiling in 3 minutes, all on small sticks otherwise useless except for kindling.
Conclusion on viability of the Rocket Stove being fit for Purpose - Resounding Success.
