![]() What’s more, the curved lid of the bird seed can performed exactly as I’d hoped, directing slopped water off the contraption and saving the fire. It scalded 8 birds on some kindling and five of those 2”x2”x10”s, and we probably could have done three more before it got cold. Two feeds definitely would have sufficed, if I wasn’t perpetually concerned about the water getting too cold for the last bird. Plus I only fed it three times, as compared to around five with the cinder block version. First, it heated the water so much faster that I had to add a bunch of cold because the birds weren’t ready yet. On processing day I discovered it performed better than the cinder block stove in several respects. That was definitely overkill the rice was done in about nine minutes, before the curry was even ready to go on. It cooked our dinner on a little bit of kindling and two 2”x2”x10”s sawed off a larger board during a recent project (salvage wood, not kiln-dried). I gave it a trial run to make sure I had the dimensions right-enough. A little rock wool instead of air might not go amiss. The purpose of the air space is to keep the outside of the can from getting nuclear, but it still gets hot. The bricks weight the can to make it more stable, which is a critical feature if you’re going to have four gallons of almost-boiling water sitting on top of the whole thing. ![]() Several half-bricks are wedged between the riser and the sides of the can, with airspace above. There’s a corrugated secondary bottom with a couple of spare firebricks underneath. The height is just right to fit in the trunk of our little Toyota Yaris.įrom this angle you can see the smoke notches in the riser, that draw the heat striaght to the pan. I cut the hole in the can and the hole in the riser using tin snips, and used a few regular screws to hold it together. The riser is more like 9” in diameter in order to accommodate the feed pipe, and 17” in height, and it’s made out of two overlapping sections of 24”-wide roofing. The feed pipe has a diameter of 7” and a length of 12”. The feed pipe and riser are corrugated metal roofing off one of the tear-down projects on our land. Slide Anything shortcode error: A valid ID has not been provided (And if you are it might be a good idea to pause right now, because we now have that mystery bird illness here in NC). ![]() I was not aware so many people are that serious about feeding their birds. This is not a 33-gallon feed can, but a smaller iteration apparently intended for holding wild bird seed. The spirit of salvage is honored here, because while I bought the exterior can at Tractor Supply, everything else was, you guessed it, lying around. I’m going to work up a better-fitting grill for the top, but at the moment i’m just using the grill from my fire bowl.Įnter this little beauty. But I was not hauling a trunk-load of antique soot-blackened cinder blocks half way across the state! We are always interested in supporting that. But their processor fell through and even though they found a new one for most of the flock, they were still interested in skilling up. Who doesn’t want to pluck and gut in July in the South? Well, everyone, of course. ![]() Then, we offered to help some friends process birds at their place. It was a great throw-together solution and that would do just fine in an emergency, but not quite convenient enough to inspire really frequent use. And after over a dozen uses, a block or two cracked (these were salvage from the tear-down houses on our land, so they were who knows how many years old). ![]() It was also awkward to move around, heavy as it was and in so many pieces. Not a big problem if for cooking, but less than ideal for scalding. Water that sloshed over the side of my giant scalding pot tended to drown the fire just slightly. That’s a lot of mileage for a device built out of stuff that was lying around. It made dinner, but it also heated the scalding water for all the poultry I processed through last fall and winter, which ended up being more than I intended. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of my cinder block rocket stove. ![]()
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