Stainless steel stove thickness and source

[Lowe Johnston]

What thickness of stainless steel is considered minimum or commonly used in constructing a wood burning stove? A 2 lbs Maxwell house coffee can appears to be between 1/32"(.03125) and 1/48"(.0208)which I have used successfully. I have found sources for stainless steel but don't know what alloy to select (301/302/304 full hard, annealed, shim stock, #1 temper, etc. Can anyone recommend a source?

[Joshua Mitchell]

mcmaster.com has a pretty good outline on what 'types' of SS are good for, however if you read it you'll find that pretty much ANY formulation (presuming you're talking the 300 series, I haven't looked at teh 400 series closely) is going to be more that adequate for a wood stove (all of their comments are mostly for industrial-type uses). Also, don't worry about temper as exposing it to bare flames is going to change the temper properties anyway. Just get one that isn't too hard (so you can work with it cold) and let it do whatever it wants to do once you start building a fire in it.

[Lowe Johnston]

Thanks for the info. The Bushbuddy Ultra has a stove wall thickness of .010" which is close to 1/128" (.0078").Wow, that's thin. However, the usual aluminum flashing sold in the hardward store is slightly thinner at only .0092" and that appears adequate to me. Aluminum flashing is so cheap, it makes me want to try it but I have a suspicion I am stepping into a bucket of you know what. I will build a prototype using aluminum flashing because it's easy to work with.

[Bill Thomas]

I built a wood stove very similar to the Bushbuddy using aluminum flashing for the inner and outer contaiers, with a hardware cloth pot support(total weight 4 oz.) With the first firing, the innner container melted. I'm experimenting with steel from a coffee can now.

[Joshua Mitchell]

"I built a wood stove very similar to the Bushbuddy using aluminum flashing… With the first firing, the innner container melted…"

I'm not surprised, we used to burn aluminum cans to ash with a simple woodfire when I was a boy (yeah, not really very LNT). In general, unless you are able to keep your fire quite tame / cold, Al isn't going to hold up well at all…

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