Trappers Cabin Season 2 Part 13 Wood Stoves

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

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Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do this morning in the Cabinet Series is just talk a little bit about cast iron type wood stoves and that's what I'm using in the cabin and they're very easy to use a very easy to maintain but you need to understand how they operate to make them work as effectively as they can in your cabin stay with me okay so let's talk about the stove itself and this is just one that I traded for you can pick these up pretty cheap you can buy them new places like tractor supply but I picked this one up and trade for right around a hundred bucks something like that now the way these stoves operate is you have to understand it's just like any other fire to burn effectively it needs girafft it needs air from the bottom and air current to draft up and you have two ways of controlling that on a wood stove like this you have a draft gate here at the bottom on this stove see if I can turn this camera down just a little bit right here and when you open that up you can hear it start to draft really heavy now when you close it down it stops so if you're trying to get a fire started you want to open that draft gate up now that's also controlled by the damper back here in the back there is a rod right here that rotates and it's got a handle on the other side to rotate it and basically that is just a flat piece of metal with holes in it that tilts back and forth and that opens up the girafft to pull more drafty the stove so you've really got two ways of controlling that so what you really want to do when you start the stove from cold if you want to slide this draft gate open

and you want to have this draft here your damper open as well that allows the maximum amount of air into that fire to start and of course you're going to use smaller material for starting it just like you would a normal fire draft in there now we can put some bigger is there fuel wood on there we'll talk about that more than minute and once this thing gets burning and you've got this stove full of wood you've got a good bed of coals built up in there you're doing to close these draft vents down a little bit or close them most of the way down and then just adjust your damper so that your fire would last longer you're conserving fuel and it'll also heat better that way you know these things are made of cast irons that are basically a giant thermal mass heater now there's a couple other things you should know about this stove as far as how they work you've got a couple of lids up here on the top of the stove and most of them come with a handle so that you can put it in there and remove that lid and that allows you to cook on top of the stove with open flame now what I've done with mine is if you don't have a pot big enough to fit over that like and I do have plenty of them but let's just say I want to use this teapot on here it's pretty much gonna sit inside that hole anything any smaller than that wouldn't fit very well this thing's gonna tilt more kinds of stuff in there so what I did was I went to a scrapyard and found an old junk stove that had a couple of the grates on top of it and I put that right on top of that open hole and put my skillet on my pot or my kettle on top of that and that gives me a little bit more versatility of use with this stove to cook with it inside and this one has two of those holes and it comes with a lifter to lift that out okay

and I keep that stored up here in the top okay there one more thing I want to show you about this wood stove it makes it just awesome it's got a lid here as well that you can lift up and you can remove that all the way off to the side because it's hinged back here in the back and then again I just got this right out of the scrapyard I can put a grill on top of this a grill rack and I can cook meat steaks will have you right on top of the stove as long as I've got the fire stoked up properly now the fire is really low right now we didn't put much fuel in there so you haven't got enough heat right here to cook anything very quickly but if you put some more in there put some more wood in there you can cook on top of this thing no problem so it just gives you that much more versatility in a stove like your slides right back over the top just like that close it up for the night so that's pretty much how this thing works as far as kind of stove operation obviously you need the same things to start this that you need for any other fire unique tender kindling and fuel pretty much the same size requirements you need something highly flammable to get started you don't want to use resin lead and wood too much in these stoves because it's really gonna get your stove pipes and stuff filthy and you have to clean them out more often if you do that but softer woods are going to be better for starting the fire and harder woods are going to be better for maintain the fire no different than a normal campfire so your ashes your hickories your oaks those are your long burning hardwoods and then to start the fire you want things like poplar and Aspen okay you can hear it drafting really well right now I'll shut up for a minute so you can hear it

and if we open it up you'll see in the back the back there it's really cooking good well the goal really here is to be able to get this fire the length of this stove if the fire is only back here then you're really not efficiently heating this thermal mass heater you really want that fire as long as the stove is so when you're cutting your pieces that you're going to use for fuel would cut them the length of the inside of that stove if you can because that'll give you better heat overall within the cabin area okay now let's talk about a couple things that you're gonna need to use this stove obviously you're gonna need the things that you need to light fires with just like you do in the woods but there's a couple other things that you may want one of them is some kind of a steel poker or rod you can forge one you can buy one you can get one from the fireplace shop it doesn't matter but it's steel poker to move that stuff around like I said to rake coals toward the front to get your fire spread out in the way you want it all those types of things is always good I keep a couple things beside the stove I keep an ash bucket beside the stove that I can put kindling in and I can also put ash in out of the bottom of the stove ash is nothing but insulation so you want to get out of the stove so once you've burned it you want some kind of a shovel that you can shovel that ash out into an ash bucket then you can take that Ash and you can repurpose it for other things around the cabin we've talked about the use of ashes up to and including making soap lots of times that they're hardwood ashes the other thing I would suggest you have is this air bellows sometimes in the morning it's tough to get a fire going again that you've had burning all night in there

you're down to embers you put some wood in there if you've got this extra air to pump to it you can get some flame going and then you're ready to rock and roll and you control everything else with the dampers and the air gate and things like that okay so those are just the things that I would have with the stove probably the last thing I keep around in here around the stove is just this firewood caddy that's just a canvas satchel that I can split firewood out I on a splitting stump bring it inside here and put it beside the stove and then I keep some split wood in there underneath the overhang on the porch as well to keep it out of the weather so that's the simplicity of the stove now when you set this thing up there's a couple things you want to remember okay you can see that we have a fire resistant board behind the stove we have another one on the ground below the stove because you're gonna get hot embers things you're gonna get hot around it and you're gonna have the issues if you don't the other thing you've got to worry about trying to adjust this camera as I talk kind of difficult where this thing goes through the wall you're going to need an insert for this this got asked the bestest or some kind of a batting in it to keep it from burning because you build up a lot of heat right between your wall studs right there from this pipe going out because this pipe gets really really hot so you're gonna need a couple inserts in there and I've got the one insert that goes attached to the cabin wall and then I have another insert here that's silver that the pipe actually goes through that just sits inside this opening and that's just another insulator to keep heat away from the wall itself so you're gonna remember have to remember you have those things available to you as well because you don't just want to set the stove up in your cabin and then you know catch the cabin on fire that's that's never gonna be a good thing so once you get this thing going in the fire starting to creep back here to the back where it needs to be you can put a little bit more fuel in there stock that thing up close the thing down and if you want to heat the cabin or you want to cook or whatever you know close your damper down a little bit close up your vent gate a little bit so it's not drafting so hard and burn up your fuel and it'll burn for a good long time if you load this wood stove up with a good hard wood like ash the thing will burn virtually I want to say six seven hours before you're gonna have to really stoke it hard again so you can get a pretty good night's sleep in the cabin like this with a stove going as long as you fill it up and maintain it maintain fire itself to begin with and get everything set up right before you turn in alright guys so that was just a quick look today at how to use a wood stove how to set it up kind of some of the things that you might need around the cabin to maintain the fire in the wood stove and care for the wood stove you're going to want to take this thing about you know every two years and paint it with a high temperature black paint you can get at any hardware store if any rust accumulates on it just take a wire brush and scrub that surface rust off before you paint it but this stove this particular one here I've had for I want to say six years now and I'm sure the guy I got it from had it before because it was used when I bought it so how many years to use it but these on cast-iron stoves will last a long long time as long as you maintain and take care of them