Well gee, it's nice to have fans. Sorry it took us so long to get back to monitoring these forums; we had a GREAT time meeting everyone on this tour, and we are also VERY GLAD to be running our little home fires again instead of the Subaru. (It survived the entire ordeal - barely - and is back in its natural home with our
local mechanic until further notice.)
I don't think I managed to capture a picture of the darn thing, but I can give you a diagram.
I do like the vertical
feed; it self-tends much better than horizontal or diagonal feeds, AND you get better fuel-air mixing with most wood fuels. You can also burn pretty big chunks of wood once it gets going.
The rocket cookstove is not very much like a smoker - in that it is specifically designed not to smoke. However, ours did sometimes soot up the pots, given that it was burning pitchy pine and sometimes damp chunks at that.
But it is designed to make cooking outdoors a lot of fun, and in that, it shares something with your nicely laid-out smoker/grill.
The diagram is the first version, which was used to cook for 40 people during the
workshop. The cook (who had never used a wood cookstove of any kind before) reported that it ranged between "high" and "freaky hot," but after a couple hours' practice, she was able to get some nice cooking temperatures by placing bricks under the pot (to slow and even out the heat), or by moving the pot skirt up and down to create a little gap.
The blue stuff (cutaway) is the path where the fuel goes in, fire burns sideways and up, and then the flame has to go right along the pot itself before it can escape.
The white and tan stuff is insulation (white is a refractory product called 'DuraBoard,' it's an experiment to see if it will out-last the more standard use of a couple chunks of stovepipe or some firebrick and perlite insulation).
The grey stuff is metal (a burned-off grease can and some lightweight sheet metal to hold the whole thing together so it can be carted around on a hand truck).
The reddish stuff are bricks; we added some down low to hold things in place and give it some better balance, and the cook added more up top to regulate the heat.
The pot skirt (also grey) is the cut-off bottom of another similar barrel, nests right inside the lip of the main one. We found that almost all the big cookpots on site were between 11 to 13 inches around, so a 14.5" pot skirt was plenty big
enough to focus the flame around the pots. I left a little extra material on when we were cutting it off, and bent it down to make handles for the pot skirt - very nice if you need to switch the chili into the hay-box, take the pot skirt off, and switch to grilling or griddle-cooking.
For the propane fryer boil-off, we firmly attached the pot skirt down, added an extension to both heat riser and pot skirt, and another inch of insulation around the pot skirt(s).
We kept adding insulation until it beat the propane turkey fryer (MAN those things are loud! I have only used propane camp stoves and had not imagined just how much gas that thing could burn.)
We also found that it worked pretty well as a primitive forge; like the cook said, it was freaky hot.
So our next version will probably not be an 'improved' cooker, but an actual forge with a pass-through for making stuff in the hottest part of the heat riser / flame path.
The cook also found that a pair of welding gloves, and a barbecue tongs, were handy for getting things in and out of the heat.
-Erica W
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