Although I very much admire the design of the Winiarski Rocket Elbow Stove, I wondered if there was some way to design into it the same multi-fuel capability that my West Mk 1 stove has. I could think of several ways of doing this, but it took me some time before I came up with a way that would be simple to build too.
At the moment this is a paper exercise –ie I haven’t found time yet to gather up the parts and build the thing! Here are the thoughts so far.
There are two main changes that create the West Elbow stove. The first is that the vertical pipe is open at both ends, and extends down to the baseplate. The second is that there is a detachable baseplate which has provision for securing a spirit burner, hexamine hearth or pot of alcohol in much the same way as the West Mk 1.
A key feature of Rocket Elbow stoves is the insulated chimney, but insulation is just still air and since this is a backpacking stove the initial design will experiment with an air space without any fibreglass or similar material. The detachable base of this design means that the interior of the insulating space can be used for storage when the stove is not in use.
The diagram below should make matters clearer. The stove is in three parts: the windshield (not shown in the diagram below), the stove and the base unit.
The windshield will be made as described in the Mk 1 stove article.
My initial idea is to use something like a cake tin to make the stove body and to use the lid as the base. When using an auxiliary fuel the burner or hearth is placed in the middle of the base and lit, the secondary windshield facilitating this. The stove body is then placed over the heat source.
The pot supports on top are best made by bending three strips of metal into “V” shapes and assembling them into the shape of a six-pointed cross, then pop-riveting them into position (remember to leave tabs to do this!). The odd shape of this assembly is to reduce the movement of wind across the stove top when the windshield is not used, for example when frying.
A key factor is finding a chimney of sufficient diameter to accommodate the burner. The most promising strategy is to use thin sheet steel and rivet it into shape. A larger can may be cut up for this purpose.
Writing about the Flatpack stove made me consider other ways to build this stove. The diagram below illustrates a “slot-in” construction method that creates a square section chimney and a square base. The side feed pipe is probably still best produced from a tubular food can.
A bit of “cardboard modeling” may be necessary to get the shapes right. Such a stove might be disassembled into a very small space for carrying.
A nice feature of this design path is that the base can be formed of a looser fitting tray held on by catches rather than a friction-fit lid, which may stay attached to the stove body when it is wanted to lift it off.
Because it must fit around the pot, the windshield should still be round, and the easiest way to mate this to a square base is to make the top surface of the stove from a circle. This will be slightly bigger than the rest of the stove, and this offers several interesting possibilities:
The stove may be small enough to nest inside the windshield. If a large pot is being used the stove may fit inside the cooking pot, which in turn nests in the windshield.
The edge of this circular plate also seems a good place to mount handles for lifting the stove body from the base.
The design feature of using a larger circular plate for the stove top can also be applied to stoves made from cylindrical tins, allowing a smaller volume tin to be used.
Hybrid stove designs also suggest themselves –for example, a stove with a square section base made from four plates pop-riveted together with a round top and a tubular chimney. A square or polygonal section chimney could also be made of plates riveted together. A square-section stove could also be made as a “truncated pyramid” shape.
Some Important Dimensions.
Select the largest diameter pot you are likely to use with your stove and measure its width. The windshield should be about a centimetre clear of either side, so add 2cm to the value you got, and remember to allow for rivets and handles etc. Jot this value down on the back of a fag packet: this is the minimum internal diameter of the windshield, the maximum diameter for the circular stove top and the maximum width for the base if the thing is to nest neatly.
The pot support rails should be around a centimetre high, but remember to allow for extra material so you can pop-rivet them to the stove top.
The Winiarski Rocket Elbow stove page states that the vertical pipe should be 9 inches and the side pipe 4 inches. This page gives a similar range of figures. I'm assuming that this is the vertical height of the chimney from top to base and 4" is the distance from the door to the chimney wall. 9" is quite a height for a backpacking stove, so your West-Elbow may have to be lower. Chimney diameter must be enough to accommodate the burner systems used.
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