Log rocket stove

Having seen the idea in the Living Woods magazine, I made and trialled a rocket stove from a larch log. It's pretty simple - essentially boring an L shaped chimney through the log, so that a fire can be lit inside and cooked on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove

As you'd imagine, setting a fire in a log makes the thing non-reusable, but then the whole point is that it slowly burns from the inside out and so not only do you have a cooker, but you also have a camp-fire for the rest of the evening.

I lit the fire inside with the usual tinder/kindling and fed it for a little while, propping the mess tin up on two larger blocks of kindling to allow for easy air flow through the chimney. The flame was almost too intense at times and it wasn't long until I could stop feeding the stove with kindling, as the log itself had lit.

It took about three hours to burn through, during which the chimney slowly expanded in size as the fire burnt, and the pattern it made inside the log as darkness fell was wonderful. In the end the walls fell in and it became a smaller pile of burning wood on the base, still with ferocious heat, that we eventually had to put out before bedtime.