Woodstove Project Overview

This wood stove is a great little project. It's made from a 30 pound propane

tank, so an old tank that's been properly salvaged and cut open and there are

procedures for doing that work safely in the instructions for this project, but

it's really built entirely from scratch except for that tank. The door is

made piece by piece and there's also a flat cooktop on on top. Both of these

parts of the project, the door and the cooktop, use what's called plug welds in

order to hold things together. I have a video about that coming up in the course

and in this case too the legs are things that have been salvaged from, in

this case the the man who made this, Dave Fink, salvaged these legs from some

metal he found along a railroad line, scrap metal, and you don't necessarily

need to use legs like this but they do look kind of nice and there's also a lot

of details for how the handle goes together as you'll see when we take a

look at the plans. As with all the projects in this course you should

definitely print out the plans so you can bring them into your shop. What

you're going to find, I think, the most challenging part of this project is making the cutouts in the propane tank. So the cutout for the door and the cutout

for the smoke pipe. I go through details for how you can use different tools to

do this. It's certainly not impossible, you don't need fancy tools, but as I said

it's probably going to take you the longest single operation on this project

We'll be cutting, making these cutouts nice and neat. Another thing to pay

attention to is this cooktop. Now it's, you're supposed to put a kettle or pot

whatever on top so you can do a little bit of cooking on it and there's these

support strips and then the top piece and the support strips weld to the body

of the stove and to the underside of the cooktop and that's how it's held on and

that'll hold it on very firmly. But here you can see these three plug welds. Those

are important because they greatly improve the conduction of heat from the

body of the stove up to the top here where you can use it. Without those plug

welds positively connecting the top of the cooktop to the stove there would be

a little gap there. There could be a little gap and you're not going to get

nearly the same heat conduction as you would with the plug weld so you don't want to omit those. As you're planning to build your stove realize that there's

probably going to be quite a call for them. They're quite cute portable little stoves and I wouldn't be surprised if you get requests for more

than just the first one you make. You need to do some planning ahead of time

though and most of that has to do with the the size and material you will use

for the smoke pipe at the back. Now these pipes are fairly small. They're

smaller than standard stove pipe so you really should start thinking about the

stove beginning with the stove pipe and find yourself some round steel that will

go inside the stove pipe that will actually be leaving your building. So

where do you find round stuff like this? Well, well casing. The kind of metal pipe

that is used for drilled wells is a good candidate. There are industrial

suppliers that can provide this sort of large diameter round tubing but I think

you'll find and talk to a well driller see what he's got on hand. He can easily

cut you off a chunk or two for use in a wood stove like this