Rocket stove from scraps

Yesterday I went out, scrounged up some stuff and slapped together this little rocket stove.

I got it fired up and it smoked back for a bit until it got burning nicely, then it started to work nicely. I noticed it wasn't very "rockety" though, which probably has a lot to do with the dimensions, but it was what I had, and it was working.

Then I got this old rusted out pail and thought I would try to use it as the barrel part in the RMH. This didn't work. In one of the pictures you can see it just smothered the fire and started smoking everywhere. So I took the lid thing off and used the pail as a support for my cooking rack after burying up around the heat riser a little more to make a nice base for the pail to sit on. I used this set up to fried my self some puff ball and zucchini for lunch. It worked very nicely for that.

Later on I thought I would try to insulate the heat riser to get it burning better and hotter. What I came up with was just putting some soil between the stove pipe and pail. I put it in very loosely and it is mostly nice fluffy top soil. So I filled it up to the top of the stove pipe and got the fire going strong again to warm it all up. This seemed to make the system work better. Now the outside of the pail was substantially less hot than with no soil insulation. After it heated up a bit, the fire really started to go and was shooting out the top of the pipe.

Here are a couple pictures of the fire burning at night.