DIY wood stove for hot tent a la TiGoat WiFi

[Philip Tschersich]

Our favorite hot tent wood-burning stove of all time is the TiGoat WiFi.

Pros:

• Very light for its firebox sizes
• The rivet-nuts (rivnuts) in the top plate give you an unobstructed cooking surface.
• The stove legs are outside the firebox and so they are much less subject to heat damage, so aluminum rod can be used.
• Due to the rivnuts, the stove’s top plate is directly supported from the ground up through the legs, independent of the stove body or other parts.
• All stove leg parts are pre-assembled (the shaft collars are permanently attached to the stove legs) and so there are no small parts to lose.
• The stove door is extremely light, simple, and easy to operate.

Cons:

• The damper was used to support the weight of the stove pipe and so became bent over time and difficult to adjust.
• The separate spark arrester (if used) corroded away pretty quickly.

I recently purchased 2 size large stove Ti ‘trays’ from Seek Outside and used them to make a top and bottom plate for a WiFi-style stove. I installed 6mm rivnuts in the top plate and cut M6 x 1.0 threads into some 6 mm x 350 mm aluminum rod, and installed 6 mm aluminum shaft collars as lower tray supports and lower stove leg stoppers. I used a medium Seek Outside U-Turn (2.5″) spark arrester/damper assembly, which solved the main gripe we have with the TiGoat WiFi damper, at a slight weight penalty. The door I made hangs via a tab in some slits I cut above the front stove body opening. The stove body, door, and base/heat shield are all made out of retired stove pipe (used and abused Ti foil) we had laying around. The firebox measures 8″ wide, 14″ long, and 9.5″ tall (20 x 35 x 24 cm).

Total weight for the stove, damper, and heat shield/stove base is 615 grams (21.7 oz). Not bad for a large wood stove. 2.5″ diameter Ti stove pipe weighs about 140 g/m (1.5 oz/ft) and the length needed is based on how high off the ground the stove jack is in the shelter canopy.

The door simply hangs via a tab inserted into one of two slits in the stove body:

With the door in the upper slit, there is an air gap at the bottom of the front stove opening to allow more air into the firebox:

In the lower slit, the stove is as closed as it gets:

A rear view showing the stove body seam and the damper assembly including the damper flap and the spark arrester adjuster rod:

I will probably make a few tweaks going forward, but I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

[Thom]

[Thom]

Before I went ultralight

[Greg Pehrson]

Once again, great work. I appreciate the MYOG inspiration you bring to BPL.

It looks like maybe the legs are sized in such a way that provides optimal spacing when they’re screwed in to the rivets on top and the shaft collars below–so you couldn’t accidentally over-tighten them and crush the stove body. If so, that’s brilliant.

Did you have to reset the shape of the old stovepipe over heat to form it into a stove body?

Curious about what you might do differently next time to address the issue with the damper bending?

Thanks for sharing!

 

 

[Kevin Babione]

I always enjoy your posts and look forward to your TR showing the stove in action.  One question:  How do you get the ashes out?

[David Gardner]

Fantastic! Inspiring. Clever door design.

What size is it when packed? Would be nice to see a picture. With practice, how long does it take to field assemble? Curious how you assemble the damper into the stack. Does any smoke leak out of the various seams?

[Philip Tschersich]

Lots of great questions.

It looks like maybe the legs are sized in such a way that provides optimal spacing when they’re screwed in to the rivets on top and the shaft collars below–so you couldn’t accidentally over-tighten them and crush the stove body.

Sort of. After initial assembly, the shaft collars on the stove legs never need to be adjusted again, and are held firmly in place with grub screws. The goal is to get full thread engagement between the top of the stove leg and the rivnut in the firebox top plate without the leg protruding through the top of the rivnut where it would interfere with a pot on the stove. So we thread the leg in and the shaft collar is set to gently bring the firebox components together, and we simply stop when we feel resistance. There are still threads on the legs left and if you really went to town on it you could overtighten the firebox. But the idea is to close the air gaps but not go any farther.

Did you have to reset the shape of the old stovepipe over heat to form it into a stove body?

Yes, the old stove pipe I used had very aggressive “shape memory” that made it a real pain to work with. I rolled it opposite its preferred curl direction and held that tube in place with stove pipe cable rings and baked that in my oven at 600 F for 1 hour. That worked wonders and caused the foil to “forget” its preferred shape. I should have done this from the outset. I did the same with the piece of scrap pipe I used for the ground heat shield and that resulted in a very well-behaved, nearly flat piece of foil. Nice.

Curious about what you might do differently next time to address the issue with the damper bending?

That was the problem with the original TiGoat WiFi design (the only problem, really) where the stove pipe inserted directly into the firebox and was supported by the ends of the thin damper rod sticking out each side of the pipe (picture an avocado seed supported above a glass of water by toothpicks). Using the Seek Outside pipe adapter/damper/spark arrester addressed this issue.

Cheers.

[Philip Tschersich]

I… look forward to your TR showing the stove in action.  One question:  How do you get the ashes out?

We usually don’t camp in one location for more than a couple of days and our wood combustion is pretty complete, so by the time we break the stove down there is not much ash accumulation. If we need to empty the ash we just let the stove get cold and take the body outside and shake the ash out the door hole. It takes about 30 seconds. We are careful about remaining embers in the ash we dump.

This video from this fall shows us using an old medium TiGoat WiFi. The somewhat small size of the top of the stove was part of the inspiration for making this project to provide a larger cooking surface.

[Philip Tschersich]

What size is it when packed? Would be nice to see a picture. With practice, how long does it take to field assemble? Curious how you assemble the damper into the stack. Does any smoke leak out of the various seams?

My next project is actually to sew a storage bag for the stove and pipe, so that will be forthcoming.

Assembling the stove body takes maybe 2 minutes. Rolling the pipe and installing the pipe rings takes maybe another 2 minutes. All told, maybe 5 minutes?

We take the parts out of the damper tube (the spark arrestor and damper) and slide the damper tube over the end of the rolled-up stove pipe. So it ends up being a short extension to the 2.5″ roll of stove pipe. The ground heat shield piece and stove body end up getting rolled up with the pipe, so it all ends up as a single tube of metal.

Despite the leaky look of the whole thing, airflow is very well directed up the stove pipe and there seems to be negative pressure at the firebox most of the time. Once the stove pipe is warmed up and a nice air draw is established, there is no appreciable smoke produced at the stove body.

Cheers

[David Thomas]

That’s a happy dog (with the scapula)!

Another inspirational DIY project from Philip.

There seems to be enough space under the stove box, above that ground plate, to thaw the next 1 or 2 pieces of firewood.

I really like the simplicity of the hanging door.  An alternate approach would be to have a fixed position of 2 or 3 doors, each with different sized openings.  Your approach uses less material and weighs less, but could you play with a mica-windowed door option for that cheery glow from the flames (and visual monitoring of the fire inside) while it is shuttered down?

Or the approach Rutan used on the windows of SpaceShipOne windows – lots of small holes, combined with the spacing of our two eyes, gives more view with less glass (mica / holes). 

Maybe play with a dense mesh material (like the mantels on old gas lights) to give visibility while still controlling air flow.

or just a few layers of SS screen-door fabric:

[Philip Tschersich]

There seems to be enough space under the stove box, above that ground plate, to thaw the next 1 or 2 pieces of firewood.

Correct. Or warm up the peanut butter cup for the next s’more.

[David Thomas]

If you’re going to escalate from Hershey bars to Peanut-butter cups for S’mores, why not go all the way and bring truffles?

some have liquor-filled centers.

[Philip Tschersich]

The pipe, stove side walls, and ground heat shield all get rolled up together, slid into the damper body, and the cable rings get stored there too. The other parts get placed between the top and bottom plates. You can slide those parts together into a stuff sack along with whatever associated junk you need like a small folding saw, gardening gloves, silicone hot pads, fire starter, etc.

The grid is one inch squares:

[tkkn c]

I really like your door.  How ho does the handle get?  Do you still need gloves with it?

[Philip Tschersich]

No, the handle gets warm but not hot. I grab it by the edges.

[Philip Tschersich]

One thing I would do differently would be to cut the slots the door tab fits into a bit smaller. A backdraft can cause puffs of smoke or a lick of flame to come out the slots which are high on the firebox. Once the draft is going, things are fine. I’m kind of picking nits here.

[Philip Tschersich]

We took the stove that I built on our most recent archaeological survey to the NE Arm of Uganik Bay on Kodiak Island. It worked really, really well. At this point, this is our favorite stove design. Very light, accepts large pieces of wood, and brings together the best aspect of various stove designs.

[Kevin Babione]

Thanks for posting – for me, at this point, it’s not about the stove itself…It’s all about the adventures that the stove gets to accompany!

[Philip Tschersich]

Thanks Kevin. Taking a wood burning stove along wildly enhances the creature comforts of these shoulder season trips when it is just above freezing and we have wind and precip to deal with. Plus, we can take and cook ‘real’ food since we have unlimited fuel on the landscape.

tkkn- it turns out that the door handle did indeed get pretty hot after all. When the fire is really cranking, sliding a stick behind the handle to lift it proved a good strategy. I might play with some mods to avoid this issue. Otherwise, the stove really delivered.

[Philip Tschersich]

Update: this thing is awesome. We put a full season on the one I initially posted and it worked a treat.

I just built another with some very minor tweaks to my original design. I went with a single door hanger slot and made the aperture smaller. I beefed up the hanger tab on the door itself. I made the seam on the back of the body where the stove walls meet a bit looser for easier assembly.

[Kevin Babione]

Beautiful…Belongs in MOMA.

[Author]

Posts