HUGE Food Drying Rack or Dehydrator Above the Wood Cook Stove

Last year I kept a small home warm with two wood cookstoves! The overwhelming knowledge that I could be making food storage by drying foods was overwhelming, alas the season passed and all I managed was some tasty pumpkin seeds, however I did burn a bit in the oven. This upcoming winter I want to go wild. I want to reliably put up a whole freezers worth of jerky with all that wasted upwards heat. I want to build a large drying rack that can safely hold upto 100 lbs of food. I'm talking drying fruit, mushrooms, herbs, jerky and even substantial hams or fish pieces. I want it to be adjustable in height from the stove to the ceiling, and even to have to option of adding several layers of drying racks, or holding up large pieces of meat, above the heat. I've done some research on ideas and I want your thoughts or opinions on how you would do it. I've seen several drying racks that are awesome! However they would keep me up all night, every night, they use a rope and do a cool figure 8 knot that keeps the rack in the correct position, but I would fear a kid, or animal, or some gnarly huge spider would undo the knot in the middle of the night and send a wooden platform burning over top of the stove and burn the whole house down! Here is a great example of the awesome drying rack, but it is only held up by a figure 8 knott:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6DnQL4E2L0


I want a redundant system that would be able to crank higher with manual easy, (even with 100 lbs of food up there) And also be locked, or have safety redundancies. I would hate however to use an an electric pulley, or something that would require electric, as I know its possible to lift it with a proper pulley.

Here is my closest working idea on how i would do this, thanks to these ingenious young boys: The system requires 9 pulleys and one hoist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UxhXnp1mcg


More on pulley science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2w3NZzPwOM


Here is an example of a steel system on a small scale that sits directly on the stove, much too small for my needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPID83WlzC0


Drying clothes is also great but frankly I doubt I should hang flammable cloth above the stove unless I need it dry really fast... Maybe that was the practical use of the clothing iron...

Hi Joshua,
I like your idea of using that heat, and I really like drying food as a good way to preserve it.

Some foods don't like being dried at that hot of a temperature, so you may not be able to use it for everything with equal results.

My first though would be some kind of metal shelf with long legs to straddle the wood stove. See the picture and imagine the toilet was a woodstove and the towels and soaps were food. Would that sort of design work for you? Maybe even put it on wheels and you could move it around a little for loading, unloading, and for different temperatures for different foods.

If you heated a thermal mass and let that mass heat the rack and the food, it would moderate the heat intensity.
Even a slab of  plaster of paris or concrete board should help.

I've commented this before whenever I see someone post about an elaborate special-built solar dryer, and it seems to apply here as well....before going to all the time, effort, and expense of setting up something like this, I invite you to consider these three niches for drying foods....1. your vehicle parked in the sun, windows ajar or not depending.  2. any green house or cold frame not in use for growing, such as during a hot summer.  and 3. the attic space of a house.  All of these can be improved by adding a fan to blow onto or across the racks of food, and by improvising something to elevate the stuff so it isn't sitting on a solid surface.  Years ago I cut up and dried a whole goat in a small greenhouse, among many other things (this is how I know that a whole goat, dried, only fills about six quart jars!  It was a small bush goat, though!)  Lately I've been doing sliced tomatoes in the attic, which works great....they are snap dry and ready to store in about four days, and it works even in cloudy stormy weather.