Wazzup Hivers? Today we share some important technological progress in our life in the forest. All this time we've been cooking on a ground fire, with this old piece of metal we found at an abandoned hydroelectric plant, but we're finally changing that.
We had an ambitious stove pĺan but things aren't as easy as they seem. Since most of the materials we use we gather in Nature, things can be very time and energy-consuming. We had to go gather stones both up the hill and down the river, sand at a slope near the forest, clay at the edge of the road. We also had to drink a lot of beer to have all the cans we used, not that we wanted to drink all that!
Our visit to the river to gather stones. We burrowed a truck so we took as many as we could while avoiding overweight.
This was the clay from the roadside. It's recommended to always test different clay/sand combinations as clay is always different in each territory. We went for 3 parts of sand and 1 of clay, which worked rather well.
After gathering the sand we were ready to go back and start building.
First thing was to create a base on which to build with stones and some sand to cover the gaps. The sand is useful to prevent the hot coals from going down into the soil.
We followed by preparing the mixture of sand and clay. We had to filter the sand and since we lacked a mesh we used a strainer which took an enormous amount of work. We'll be needing that mesh soon.
We begin stacking up stones and cans, placing our mud mix in each layer to hold them together. The mix ended up feeling very similar to cement. We had an old grill which we used to complete the ashtray.
We kept going up and placed an old burner we found when dumpster diving.
We have some plans to keep going up and cover the burners with more mud to make it as efficient as possible. Also, a tin door will go in place when we find a way to attach it. Nonetheless, we already lit it up because we wanted to cook with the comfort of not having to bend over to check on stuff all the time.
So far so good, cooking has been faster and more comfortable. We also use less firewood as the heat doesn't disperse as much as before.
That's it for now, we hope you liked our little experiment and we'll be showing you our updates in the future.
Have a great weekend!