Silverfire Rocketstove conversion to mass heater/stove part 3

So these are the "tools" I used to dig out the sand/dirt from the clay mold under the wet newspaper. It took at least a couple hundred spoonfuls - so reminded me of the first computer game I played, something about escaping prison by digging an underground tunnel with a spoon. haha.

Next....

So here is the mold dug out with the cardboard still intact. The plan was to burn out the cardboard while drying out the clay. But first I made a little hole so there was air - but oops - it was very fragile and a crack/crumble appeared - on the front edge. You can see one already here - a bit.

So then I got a fire going and the idea was to burn out the cardboard off the side over the duct pipe. But since it's a rocket stove - the chimney effect did not allow any fire to spread sideways. Not much anyway.

So after it dried out from fire a bit then I got the Dragon Pot - to test it out - and I figured with the pot over the stove opening, there should be fire going sideways. Nope - instead, as I suspected would happen, the smoke began leaking out of the clay on the front. The Dragon Pot is called such, since the idea is to have two sides of metal with the heat from over the stove rim going up the sides of the pot.

But if I had the pot on the rim of the stove then I could not vent the heat to the side. So after pondering this and continuing to try to burn off the side duct pipe cardboard mold - I noticed that already the duct pipe was getting hot and maybe a little smoke/exhaust was getting out.

So then I realized what I needed to do - trust the chimney effect of the duct pipe and close off the top of the stove with clay. So then the cooking will be through the heat conducted through the clay. But what to support the clay with?

Don't tell anyone but I cut up a couple of the stainless steel drain laundry filters - as I noticed online that since they are "rust proof" and "long lasting" that are stainless steel, even though the package doesn't say stainless steel.

O.K. so now I need to make up another batch of clay as the stove cools down. I did boil water as well. I will then put the two stainless steel filters over the opening of the clay stove and turn it into an "oven."

the other mistake I made is that the cardboard frame was hanging over the edge of the stove and I knew that would probably cause it to leak smoke under the cardboard frame. But I let it go just to see if I could fix it later, as I wanted to make sure the cardboard supported the sand-dirt mold.

So then I was patching it up with more clay - and it seemed to patch up o.k. but not quite good enough. So then I tried to burn off the cardboard underneath the clay - but it did not really burn out yet. So I'm not sure how to fix it yet - but will add more clay on top.

Wow that was fun - I just mixed one part sand-grit to the clay since I figured the clay was already kind of sandy - and so should be less crumbly. And sure enough it turned into 'bread dough" - just clung together and I put the laundry filter screen over the top while adding clay to each end, to hold it down. The I added a 2nd laundry filter screen over the other direction, again adding clay.

I call this the MonsterMash stove-heater! (trademarked!).

Now for the whole operation.

So you gotta enlarge these photos to get a good look at the cracks left in the clay. But remember this is my 2nd layer of clay and I can also do another layer to fill in more cracks. The tricky part was the front of the stove as the clay kept falling off. But I checked the stove twice now and so it's been drying for almost half an hour and has held on so far. Sunny and 80 degrees Fahrenheit but probably get rain again tonight and a storm tonight. I covered the stove with the tarp last night and it actually survived the storm in the middle of the night.

Getting the cardboard off the duct pipe was tricky - as it was thick cardboard. I found a stone sculpture tool that is a kind of curved scalpel file. So I used that to cut into the cardboard and then I used a kitchen tongs to grab the cardboard before it fell into the duct pipe. So I could not see off to the side under the clay. Also the stove was still hot. haha. But anyway finally I just put my hand in there and started tearing and pulling and I pulled out all the cardboard in one big piece! But it then cracked the clay. Still the stove-mass heater luckily didn't just all fall apart since I had baked the clay a bit with that fire earlier for over an hour.