Rocket Stove insert for antique wood cook stove

I just salvaged an old wood cook stove from a friends barn and it is very rusty and cracked. So I thought I could bypass using the cracked parts by converting it to a rocket stove. When I googled it I couldn't find any other examples of the idea. The only posts were here on permies.com. Does anybody have any Ideas on building it. I was thinking of using cardboard tubing and a clay perlite mixture(or expanded clay pellets and refractory cement) to form a Rocket stove insert that would fit in the fire box. The smoke could be directed around the stove to use the oven and it would heat the whole cast iron mass. There is also a hot water manifold in the fire box that could be attached to a water tank. Erica Weisner using one of the burner holes for a feed tube on another thread which is a great idea, and the stove actually has a hole cover that opens to three graduated sizes and would be ideal for that. But I was wondering do people think about using both feed tube above and front door below for straight feed/clean out? Also if the minimum dimensions are used ie 4 inch opening does the fire box have to be 8 inches tall? Or can it be 3 inch open and 6 inches tall and still be an effective rocket stove? What should I make the insert out of? Anyone out there ever tried this before? Any Ideas would be appreciated.

Jeff : Welcome to Permies, congratulations and a Big Welcome to PERMIES Rocket Stoves Forum/Threads !

Please don't do anything until you have let a professional restorer look at it ! Looking down inside the fire box, you have a set of shaker grates, If you work at it
carefully they should come out ( remember how you did this, this will work for probably 90% of all cookstoves ) we need to know how much abuse they have had,
and are they warped ! I am going to send you a way to go to a specific site to look at a house type and a Rocket Stove type ( The 1st build i ever worked on ! )
Then we will Talk about how small you can make a Rocket Stove.

I think we need to hook you up with Kirk 'Donkey' Mobert (not sure if that spelling is just right !) , who has a healthy respect for old cook stoves but lives with a
Rocket Stove built from a cookstove that couldn't be saved!

Be right back ! For the good of the Craft ! Be safe, keep warm ! - PYRO AL - as always your Comments/Questions are solicited and Welcome !

Here's an ad from when it was originally sold.

Jeff : I am sending you to you tube to type - '' a look at Chelle Lindahl's rocket mass heater '' into the You Tube search tool and then click on to it ! This was a professional job,
the working core of which was created over a 3 day weekend as part of a rocket stove building workshop ! Prior to the Construction of this rocket stove she heated her whole
house with a wood cookstove that had a fire box approximately the same size as yours ! When you watch this,you will see an exterior shot of the House, at 2:26, this is a new
owner built home and this very well made and insulated, And the upstairs is heated via an open stairway ! The cookstove was her sole heat source up until this Rocket Stove
Build and she kept her house warmer with that than I keep my house ! ( Because this was a video about the new Rocket Stove, the cook stove was not included in the video !

I have already told you that a similar heater to your find can heat a well isolated house, but if you look at the size of the fire box that you have to work with, you will see
that your cookstove would need near constant feedings every 15-20 minutes with very small diameter short wood to perform such a big stroke of work ! to Insulate the
original fire box on this cook stove, which is where ALL Rocket Stoves get their high efficiencies, would shrink the fire box down to the size where it will no longer WORK !

It is possible that this stove is fixable and is worth making the effort to do so, it may be that you would end up selling the thing outright to a rebuilder who would then fix
it and sell it to a yuppie to put in a Ski Lodge somewhere, the final choice on its fate would be yours !

If you are still thinking of making a Rocket stove out of pieces of this stove, then you need to learn about three different types of Rocket Stove Mass Heaters while
I only know and understand J Tube Rockets, there are very similar stove that load their fuel horizontally from the front and are called horizontal Rockets ! And batch loading
stoves that have their creators looking for wood stoves just like yours - they just want to steal the oven door off of your stove, but might be prepared to show you how to do
that for yourself ! Again, I am not qualified to talk to you about understanding the last two kinds of Rocket Stove Mass Heaters, or directly about any kind of conversion! Though
if you were closer I would volunteer to help with ANY part of it ! ! !

I am leaving you to chew on this post while I go see a man about a donkey ! For the good of the Craft ! PYRO AL - all comments welcome !

I

Jeff : I just sent you a private message ! If you have any questions just come back to this thread, generally there is someone here to help ! Big Al

Thanks Allen for all your great advice, unfortunately I haven't been able to locate a professional restorer here in Nova Scotia. I was hoping a rocket stove insert would be a way of using it without destroying the integrity of the stove for future restoration. If I could re-cement the fire box and seal the stove up it might be usable that way. The fire box is approximately 9" by 18 ", if there's not a way to scale a rocket stove down that far to fit into the fire box then it might just end up as a decoration in a cabin.