Woodgas stove – is ‘gas wick’ really needed?

if it works without it don't worry about it. I have never read about using a "gas wick" with any of these stoves and i have made a few of diff sizes.

What r u using for a pot stand?

-Tim

Throw out the gas wick, make the holes in the outer can bigger, and make a pot stand out of some mesh or another can to go on top.

The 'pro' design is here:
http://bushbuddy.ca/indexs.html

Tim – I've only seen the gas wick on a few designs :)

For a pot stand I'm currently using a coat-hanger zig-zag around the top. Holds the pot at just the right height, but offers no wind protection. I'll need a tin snips to make a better one I think :)

Rog – I enlarged the bottom holes a bunch earlier today – really helped! Currently I've rigged a wire pot stand, but I want to fashion one out of a can so I'll have some wind protection. The Bushbuddy photos are a good guide for that :)

Water boils! So far, so good – gas wick or not :)

Regarding the use of a gas wick. I haven't used one myself but here is what I think about it.
If you are not using forced air and you need to mix more for secondary combustion then you need to suck in the air into the gas flow.

One way to do this is to use a venturi effect. Basically when a gas is going faster, its pressure will be lowered. Because the presence of the gas wick limits the space available for the gases, these will go faster there and the pressure will be lower inside the gas wick. So on the walls of the gas wick, if you drill holes, the hot gases will stay inside and outside air will get mixed in.

Just look at the color of your flame and the soot, measure the time it takes to bring water to a boil (or weigh the water before and after five minutes of boiling time for example). Then do the same with gas wick + holes, you should definitely see an improvement, and maybe a blue flame with no soot…