WIFI wood stoves
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Rivnut in U-turn top plate:
T-nut stove leg base (slightly crushed with channel locks so they grip the leg all thread and don’t fall off):
Scrap of pipe turned into heat shield/stove base:
If you look at YouTube on how to install a rivnut their usefulness and application will be obvious. On the SO website it show their stoves with wing nuts holding the top plate on. This basically prevents the use of a decent sized cook pot with the stove. I think they are currently shipping stoves with t-nuts (the flanged nut on the lower legs in the above images) that sit nearly flush in the top plate, like a loose rivnut. That’s great, but the ones the send aren’t stainless, and if you lose them you have problems. Also, because the rivnut is captured, the stove legs directly support the top plate, rather than the compression force being passed down through the stove walls to the bottom plate. The walls are much thinner Ti foil and deform easily. That said, the U-turn works fine w/o the channels the WiFi has. All these stoves experience a LOT of heat warpage and look pretty funky after moderate use. But as long as you don’t lose parts, overstuff with wood, or really abuse them, they work well despite adopting non-Euclidean geometries.
The legs in the image are the stock stainless allthread. They are good quality. No heat deformation or corrosion so far. I tried some M5 (metric) titanium allthread legs with my stove (the pics are of my friend Patrick’s stove that I worked on), and despite it having a higher meltpoint than stainless (ignoring alloys here), I did get some heat warping in my ti legs inside the firebox. They may be junky ti though. I don’t know how aluminum would fare, but the legs that pass through the combustion chamber are subject to some serious heat. A metallurgist would have to chime in.
The rivnut on a small WiFi (note the nice corner gusset tacked in):
WiFi channels;
Thanks for weighing in, Kevin. You’re continued engagement on these forums is always constructive. One thing that really impressed me about the U-turn was how it seemed more efficient. Since I cut most of the wood, and Patrick does the cooking while feeding the stove and controlling the dampers, I’m acutely sensitive to fuel consumption. The WiFi gobbles wood, and the U-turn has a more reasonable appetite.
As long as we are on the topic of stoves, I quickly want to address perhaps the most frustrating part of getting a new stove: rolling the pipe for the first burn.
Your new pipe will arrive like a roll of toilet paper and will single-mindedly want to assume that shape. You have to unroll it and force it to roll in an orthogonal orientation the first time you use it. Once you have burned the pipe in once it will happily roll into either shape, but before that, yow!
This is what I came up with. On a table saw, I made an offset cut in one wall of a 10’ piece of PVC pipe. I slid the pipe foil into this cut and used a firm but smooth surface (rigid foam board) to facilitate rolling the pipe around the PVC. I was able to slide the cable rings into position and then slide the PVC back out the end. The result was a pipe with hardly a dimple.
Viewed from the end before rolling:
Rolled with cable rings in place:
So smmmmmooooooth, lol:
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