Back for more... The holes are covered and I am ready to try out my fuel cartridge system. The stove pipe on the left is the cartridge. It is capped on top so that it does not act as a chimney.
Fuel package... sticks (a fagot in the old days) wrapped with paper. My thought was that the paper on the outside would keep stick ends from catching on anything. There was no catching, but maybe that would not have been a problem anyway. So this bundle is about 3.5 feet long. The idea is to make things self feeding. It did feed without problems. However, the paper blocked the air flow to the twigs inside and they tended to smolder. Either I need to get rid of the paper or I need a bundle of smaller ones.
Here is the fuel package in the cartridge. Next time I will try all sticks... maybe tied together, maybe not.
Cartridge in place.
Ready to light.
Away it goes. A short video would be nice, but my camera wasn't cooperating that day.
Keeping the riser hot enough with so little fuel was hard. It smokes more when cool.
And less when hotter. I want to try it again when I have better (denser) fuel.
I found the cap was not too air tight. Tapping it down helped most of it and some insulation got the biggest gap at the pipe seam. For all the smoke the cap never got more than warm to the touch. One of my worries was that even with no leak it would capture too much heat. That does not seem to be the case. That little bit of leak left a surprising amount of residue on the inside of the cartridge. This could be an issue with other feed ideas. Test any ideas outside and correct any problems.
