Just a little update on the sideways burning stove for you. The door is now opening and shutting quite nicely – the tensioning latches you can see below will hold the loading chamber door against the glass rope sealing strip (once we put it in). We picked up a few of the latches from e-bay quite cheaply – hopefully they will do the job and the springs will last through the thermal cycling they will receive.  We made little hooks on the body of the stove for the catches, out of old nails and weld filler (our exciting little attempt at weld sculpting).

Primary and secondary combustion air supply

So we used the magic hacksaw to make a few cuts in this old but thick walled pipe (scrap dug from Dave’s garden). Making four cuts at 22.5 degrees we can make up a 90 degree bend so that there is a less abrupt change in direction, and thus less turbulence and resistance for the incoming air.

After cleaning up the ends of the pipe, we are ready for welding. I think we achieved some pretty good welder settings for these welds, they were fairly flat and consistent, and I could tell from looking inside the pipe, had good penetration.

After tack welding, the technique we used was, fairly high voltage settings, and short runs of say 1.5 to 2cm, so that it didn’t overheat and burn through. As we haven’t done loads of pipe welding, and we don’t want these leaking air, we ground the weld a bit just to check it was sound – and it was pleasingly seamless, so all good on that front.

Apparently, the best combustion occurs with high velocity preheated air, not necessarily high volume. That way the fuel in the combustion chamber mixes up better with the igniting gasses.  To this end, and also to distribute the air, we drill a bunch of holes in the pipes to act as air nozzles. The number of holes was worked out so that it was just slightly less than the carrying capacity of the pipe.

Once we are happy, we use a hole saw to drill some holes in the stove body to accept the pipes…

That’s it for now, in terms of the burn unit we are about ready to start putting insulation and a refractory coating in, so that fun coming next…

Posted: 04|9|12 at 10:36 pm. Categorically squeezed into: Wood Stove.

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