Ray Jacobs

thomas rubino wrote:Hi Jay;
Yes, you can dry stack a core for testing.
Your core, however, is not wide enough to sit a barrel on. You will need a brick surround (wall) on both sides of the core.
Something that 2/3rds of the barrel sits on for support.
The heat will exit out the bottom of the barrel behind the riser.

You want a 3"+ gap between the top of the riser and the lid of the barrel.
With a dry stack and no tension frame, you will have air leaks, you can use plain mud on the outside of the core if leakage is excessive.
Build your test, and light it off with no barrel.  Let it burn 20-30 minutes to get good and warmed up.
Then, using gloves lower the barrel over top and watch the effect it has on how well your J-Tube is burning.

Perfect! Thank you for the tips, I think I have enough to go on now.

Scott Weinberg wrote:

Tom will probably jump in here, but the short answer is yes, the longer answer is depends.    Let me express in more detail.

Some of this depends on your temp during testing, some depends on how handy you are? ( such as making a tension frame)

So if you have watched some of Tom;s video's and maybe Glens or mine,  What I wanted point out is that your asking a potentially vague question as it would be hard to tell if you wanting to know if it will burn and light easily, or the style of your experiment?  i.e.  A J-tube will be the easiest to lite.  And it goes on from there.

But, are you wanting more in your test, such as knowing how a barrel transmits heat?    Again, so many variables.

But maybe as simple as wondering if you can dry stack bricks, and get by for a short test. To that I would probably yes, but it wouldn't hurt to toss out your ideas. on the actual layout of bricks.

Thanks for your reply! I am looking to see if I can get it to burn fairly efficiently before I add mortar and then progressively test each step (add barrel, add ducting & mass). I think my takeaway is test a short burn - I have a copy of the Wisners' RMH Builder's Guide starting with the J tube and then go from there.  

Hello! I am a lurker as well and started down this same path of trying to figure it out for myself (bought a book, watched a bunch of vids...). My question is, now that I have fire brick and a 55 gal drum I want to try to build a "test" rmh, i.e. without mortar. I want to stack the fire brick and put the drum on it (then I need to figure out how to exhaust it - although I can build it outside to start. Will a mortar-less rocket mass stove (half-heater) work? Where can I go for help?

Thanks for any guidance. Meantime, I'll look at these books mentioned above for insight...