How to Build a Homemade Wood Stove

Earthen fireplaces and wood-fired stoves have been used from the beginning of human housing. Today's technology and ancient earth-mixing methods gives us the best of both worlds--earthen art designs that make houses feel like our ancestor's village home. Earth is far more efficient than metal for absorbing, holding and radiating heat into a house and is the reason earthen fireplaces are common in many parts of Europe.

Damper parts from a wood stove
Fire bricks
Ground tarp
5 gallon bucket
Shovel
Door and door-parts from a wood stove
Straw
Oil and recycled wax
Brushes
Rocks, glass or other natural ornaments for designs
Metal screen mesh
Sand
Copper tubing
Wheel barrow
Metal length about 2-by-12-inch, handle preferred

Instructions

- 1
  Locate the stove on a central area fire-brick or stone base where it will radiate heat into the biggest areas of your home. Prepare for several days of mixing and shaping adobe for your fire box, stove and chimney. Practice coiling stove pipe with your earth-clay ahead of time to become familiar with the process.
- 2
  
  Earth and rock chimney at the center of a circular roof, an optimal design for heating and strength.
  
  Position the wood stove to send the earth or clay-coiled stove-pipe outside through the high part of a wall or roof. Use a window if you cannot cut a hole into your wall or roof. The chimney is strongest if round and going straight up. Dump two buckets of clay-heavy dirt onto your tarp. Begin to dance on the pile while slowly adding straw and water. Pull the corners regularly into the middle to mix and keep going until it feels like bread dough.
- 3
  Take the mix to your stone or brick base in a wheelbarrow. Load the earth/clay onto the base and shape it into a firebox. Stack fire bricks into back and/or side walls, and load the damp earth behind them while firmly pressing them into each other. Weave copper tubing into this soft earth structure, so the opening of the coils are inside the firebox pulling heat, and the coil climbs around inside the walls.
- 4
  Complete the copper coil's journey by placing the open end on the inside of the chimney in front of or below where you will place the damper. Leave the bottom of your stove where the grill will be. Form an earth lower front lip to make a base to mount the stove door.
- 5
  Make the lower front lip to frame the door, leaving four or five holes below the front door to create and control the draft. Craft a metal slider to close the front hole. Make all fireplace walls as thick as possible while maintaining an attractive shape, using copper tubing to distribute heat into the earth where you want it to radiate out into the house.
- 6
  Send the coiled chimney, shaped with your earth/clay adobe mix, up and out the upper back of the fire box. Embed the damper where you want it.
- 7
  Seal any area around this pipe with wet clay, coating or sealing it later with oil melted with wax. Use pure melted wax to seal other potential cracks. Protect a pipe not under your roof over-hang with many layers of oil and/or wax coatings and put a stove-pipe metal cap on the top after embedding the mesh screen into the earth over the topmost hole.

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