How to Make an Outdoor Wood Burning Stove
- 1). Use your cutting torch to cut a 30-gallon steel drum in half along the short radius. Use the appropriate safety gear, including eye protection/safety glasses and heavy leather metal-working gloves.
- 2). Place the open end of one half of your 30-gallon drum onto the 2-foot-by-2-foot sheet of ¼-inch thick sheet steel. Tack weld the two together with your wire-feed welder.
- 3). Mark an 8-by-8-inch square in the center of the side of the barrel half. Use soapstone to make your marks to ensure that the marks do not melt away when you are cutting it out.
- 4). Cut the marked square out of the barrel half with your cutting torch. This will be the door of the woodstove for feeding in firewood.
- 5). Weld one half of the two heavy-duty hinges onto the side of the door cut-out. Weld the other halves onto a 1-by-1-foot sheet of 1/8-inch thick sheet steel. Use a single-jack sledge hammer to roughly beat the sheet steel to match the angle of the barrel half.
- 6). Install the door hatch of the woodstove onto the hinges.
- 7). Use your cutting torch to cut a hole in the top of the barrel half that is the same diameter as the 1-pound coffee cans. Tack-weld one of the coffee cans to the edges of the hole to make a stovepipe base.
- 8). Use tin snips to snip multiple 1-inch deep cuts into the lips of the coffee cans. Use these cuts to connect and disconnect the cans together to create an improvised stovepipe.
- 9). Cut a series of six small holes, approximately ¼ inch in diameter, along the bottom edge of the side of the barrel hole just below the door hatch. These are the draft holes for assuring oxygen intake into the fire.
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