Changes in life, looking back, looking forward

Kevin W Tharp Portrait with Guitar

Surviving a rough patch in the road.

Kevin W. Tharp Portrait
Surviving a rough patch in the road.

Since I last published to this blog, the whole world has changed. Some of it has been political, some of it has been religious, some economic, and I don’t even need to say anything about COVID.

We are seeing a different world than the one that we saw the last time I posted here. Ultimately, I believe the world will be a better place for many of the changes. But there are a host of people worldwide who have shown that they are not in favor of a civil society. Ignorance has been elevated for some to being a lofty goal, and they are working real hard at it. Critical thinking has been abandoned by a third of the people, embracing a selfish, angry and hateful view of the world.

Last Picture before I got sick
Last picture before I got sick

The journey over the last few years has been hard, for me and for many others. I went through 18 months of waves of illness that left me, at times, unable to do anything but sleep, eat and manage bodily functions. I was isolated for about 14 months, never going into a store, restaurant, bar or anywhere else except for home and camping. But it gave me a chance to think, a lot. It gave me a chance to look inward and an opportunity to understand what is valuable to me.

Shingles was one of the things that I experienced

I was very angry for a while, but I have learned how to manage that on a spiritual level instead of an ego level. And I am much better for it. I am at peace (most of the time), and I have learned how to maintain that peace even when it seems like the world around me is embroiled in chaos.

I recognized that for me the meaning of life is love. And I have found the path to peace within me. It has been a profound period in my life.

I grew my hair and beard while I was in isolation. A lot of people don’t recognize me.

I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s. We lost my wife’s mother as well, though we don’t know how or why because it was in the middle of the first wave of the Pandemic in NY in 2020 and she was living in a nursing home at the time.

I got a chance to visit my mom right before she died. I was able to borrow a guitar and in her deathbed raise her from an uncommunicative state to singing, dancing and giving a war whoop at the end of a song. Two weeks later she was gone.

I’ve lost friends to Covid. But I have lost more to the ignorance that has been prevalent for the last two years. Frankly, if you are unwilling to wear a mask and get vaccinated to save my life, you really are not a person that is a friend.

So now I am back, different for sure, but healthy again and preparing for how I am going to spend the rest of my life with my wife. I have come to terms with being tied to an employer because of health insurance, even though that employer does not value me or any of my colleagues. And I guess that is okay. I recognize it for what it is, and will never again let that affect my well-being. It is a job, it is not my life. And it is sometimes really hard to get to a place where you can live with that in peace. But I have.

That is really all I wanted to say. I am changing providers that host this site, and so I wanted to check in so that it is at least a little current. Most of my effort goes into my other properties, but even those were left to linger while my health, the pandemic and a society hell bent on destruction took the stage. Hopefully things will start to normalize and I will be able to spend more time and effort on the things I love, like music, art and sharing my thoughts online.

I wish you all peace and love, they are what is important in all of our lives.

Kevin

It has been a very long time since I dropped by

Hi!  Surprised to see me?  I am sort of surprised to see you too.  I haven’t posted in well over a year in my musings.  I guess my last post was deep enough to free me to focus a little time on other parts of my journey.

Man, it is a cool one.

The journey that is… it is cool journey.  That is what I was referring to when I said “Man, it is a cool one”.

I celebrated by 30th anniversary to my wonderful wife this year.  30 years, hard to believe.  It goes by so fast, it goes by so slow.  But it definitely goes by.  There is no stopping that.

And changes, they are about as steady as time.  The one thing that is constant is change.  Been a lot of changes since my spirit last called me to write here.  Some of them seem good, some of them seem real bad.  I guess only time will tell.

But life goes on.  Until it doesn’t, and then it goes on for everyone else and we just don’t know what happens to you.  We know the physical part, but we don’t know the spirit part, no not at all. Some of us pretend like we know what is out there.  But shit!

We know nothing.  And yet we let the stories we have been told lead us to war, and hate and violence.  A lot of it in the name of religion.  The stories we are told to teach us how to think, religion.  The stories all tell us to love, but whenever I see hate out there, religion is right in there with it.  Maybe not always, but near enough to always to count it.

If it isn’t stories, then it is something else stupid that we draw out to separate ourselves out from someone else.  Color, nationality, what we do, or who we see.  Something to make me think of you as different, so I can justify hating on you and loving on me.

What ever happened to we?  What ever happened to you?  What ever happened to me?  What ever happened to we.

My spirit calls on me to write

I do not know why, but my spirit is calling on me to write.  I have had enough opportunities to have my spirit call to me that I trust it and bide its call.

I guess we are all on some type of journey our entire lives, whether we realize it or not.  In truth, we may each be on several journeys simultaneously.  The journey I am compelled to write about today is my spiritual journey.

Looking back, there are many moments and many people who have played a part in my spiritual journey.  But at this point there are a few that stand more prominently in the light of my vision.

The earliest spiritual experience I had, though I would have called it a religious experience at the time, was at a Catholic retreat in the Catholic High School gym in Flagstaff, Arizona.  I would have been in eight or ninth grade at the time.  It was the first time I had an opportunity to really explore and prod my own relationship with my spirituality.  That was a very long time ago, and I don’t remember the details, but I remember being deeply moved as I nudged my way into spiritual self-exploration.

When I was in college at SUNY Cortland, I had a number of experiences that primed me for spiritual self-exploration, but none of them were a true effort of exploring my spirituality.  One thing stands out during that time period that helped to pave the way for me to continue that spiritual journey, accidentally learning how to meditate.

I remember this very well.  I was sitting on the floor in Paul Fabozzi’s room in Randall Hall, up on the 3rd floor.  We were sitting there doing nothing but listening to music, probably at least a little bit high.  I was staring at a spot on a poster on his wall and focusing on a single tiny spot of brightness in an otherwise relatively dark poster.  I think it must have been a concert poster for some rock band, I don’t remember the poster, but I do remember that spot.  As I focused on that spot my breathing slowed and became deeper and rhythmic.  I let my mind wander into that spot of light and before I knew it, my conscious was outside my body.  I don’t know a better way of explaining it.  It was deeply soothing and my thoughts slowed to the point where I escaped from the bombardment of thoughts that were normally in my brain.  I guess it was the first time I escaped my own consciousness while I was awake and moved into what I feel was a sub-conscious state.  I think Ekhart Tolle would say I had escaped my ego.

A short while later, something, a sound or a movement, caught my attention and broke the trance and I came crashing back into my conscious.  But I was amazingly relaxed and at peace.  I wanted to find a way back to that place so I began a meditation practice.  I made a point of almost every day sitting down in my room and taught myself to meditate.  It was incredibly refreshing and I found that a half hour of meditation was as good as several hours of sleep for refreshing myself and clearing my mind to focus on one thing at a time.

I continued that practice for the remainder of the school year, I even created a video that was shown in a film festival about my experience with meditation, and what it was like in my mind when I was meditating.  But, my practice was broken when I moved out of the dorm in May 1986, and I have never made my way back to a regular meditation practice.  (I should do something about that).

It was a very long time after that before I came back to my spirituality in any way.  It was largely forgotten until my son, Brandt was born in 1992 and we as a family started going to church regularly at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Springfield, MO.  It was there that I became part of a community of believers, and developed extremely close ties with a fantastic group of people, especially the Men’s Club and their families.  We spent many years with this family of friends watching our families grow, and exploring our faith and belief systems together.  I am still very close friends with a few of them, even after 16 years of living away.

In 2001, very shortly after 911, my family moved to Rockhampton in Queensland, Australia on a work visa that wold also eventually lead to my PhD studies.  In Australia, our experience with religion, and with Catholicism began to change and the facade of religion started to remove itself from my spiritual beliefs, but not in a big way yet.  But one thing stands out in my mind from our time in Australia.

I was traveling down a road just out of Rockhampton with a colleague, Wal Taylor.  We came to an area and I got ah overwhelming feeling of dread or foreboding.  I told Wal, “there is something evil around here”. Wal told me that the location where we were at was a place where people used to go to “hunt” aborigines and that there had been a massacre nearby. The thought of hunting human beings is quite disturbing.   (Hunting of Aborigines by the “Native Police” around Rockhampton is referenced in the book “The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police”, Jonathan Richards, 2008).

After we moved back to the United States, I ended up working at what was then the University of Missouri – Rolla, now called Missouri University of Science and Technology.  My son Jax was enrolled at the elementary school at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church.

On December 15, 2006 when I went to drop Jax off, there was a van full of military people parked in the school parking lot.  I asked Jax if something was going on, and he said there was a funeral for a soldier that had died in Iraq.  I dropped Jax off and was heading to work when for whatever reason my spirit told me that I needed to go to the funeral.  I listened to my spirit, and my life has never been the same.

I called my supervisor, Cheryl McKay.  I told her I didn’t know what exactly was going on but that I was being called to be at the funeral for this soldier and told her I would be late for work.  She said something to the affect of, “you have to go, tell me what happens when you get done.”

The soldier’s name was Captain Travis Patriquin (Obituary).

The details of the day are not important here, but I ended up sitting in the back pew with a person who was a cousin, or something to that affect, of Captain Patriquin.  We spoke and I told him that I didn’t know Captain Patriquin, I was a member of the church and when I learned of the funeral I felt compelled to pay my respects .  When he learned that the church did not take up a collection at a funeral, he took out his wallet and said “watch this”.  He took a couple of hundred dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to me and said, “do something good with this.”

After the service had ended and everyone left, I returned to the church and sat, emotionally overwhelmed, sobbing in the back pew.  I knew the priest and when he saw me he asked if I was related to the family.  I told him no and we sat down and I told him the whole story.  I asked him what I should do with the money, and he said that it had come to me, it was my decision what do with it.  I asked him if he would hold the money, and he put it in an envelope in his desk and called it the “miracle money”.  Eventually, and it didn’t take long, we identified a good cause and it is my understanding that it helped a family through a difficult time.

But, I was changed forever.  The series of events that led up to me going to and serving witness at that funeral changed me, and lit a fire in me that has had me on a soul searching journey ever since.

It is now eleven years later.  I am no longer a member of the Catholic church and I do not practice any religion. My focus is spiritual.  There is seldom, if ever, a day that passes when I do not think about my place in the world and relationship to others, and I allow that to lead me through my day.  Some days it is easier than others.

I have learned to recognize and try to minimize the impact on myself of those things that are most divisive among humans: race, religion, creed, gender and politics.  I have come to recognize that human nature, within its ebbs and flows, is relatively consistent.  There will always be the seven sins and they will be countered by the seven virtues.  It is up to each and every person to decide in the form of many small decisions every day whether they will take the path of the virtues. It is never too late to choose a path of virtue, or to fall off of that path.  We can certainly influence others on their paths, but in the end you are the only one that can change your own heart.  You and only you can choose your path.

This is a daily struggle, but one which I am at peace in undertaking.

I think that takes care of getting out what my spirit thought I should write.  You now have access to a little glimpse of my spiritual journey and I share it with you willingly.

Categories: Love Pondering Spirit

Tags: , ,

Change

I created this blog out of a sense of growth and with no vision for what it would be other than a blog.  I have grown since then, and I have moved further down the path of my journey.  I have launched a new endeavor, and it overlaps some of what I have done on this blog.

I will be migrating some of my content from this blog to my commercial endeavor, “Puttin’ Up with Doc T”.  Anything related to the “doing of things”, such as rocket stoves, and gardening will now live on the new blog.

This blog will now serve a role more closely related to the name, “Musings”.  In all honestly, I don’t expect anyone to ever read this post.  I have no true following, though I do have some people who have enjoyed my posts.

This now will be a place for my thoughts and contemplation as I continue my way through my personal journey.

Thanks for reading, I wish you peace.

Kevin W. Tharp

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Of Peace, Love and Joy

Live Peac Love
Live Peace Love

Of Peace, Love and Joy

Kevin W. Tharp                                     December 2014 

We

You

Me

As I grow older I am given the opportunity to reflect on many of the mysteries of life.  I walk a path that often changes my perspective on the world.  Many times in my life I have found myself with thoughts that are completely contradictory to the thoughts of the younger me.

I once was an active poet, writing many poems of which I now have no recollection.  But there is one poem that I wrote over 30 years ago that holds truer today than I could have ever imagined.

I used to laugh at people like me

Look at me now

I used to laugh at people like me

It was an early realization of the nature of my own human existence.  A recognition that even as a teen I had changed my perspective on some of the big questions of life, and a glimpse into the ever evolving nature of me.

I no longer profess to have the answers, or even a clue about the answers to some of the questions that life presents us.  The answers to questions of spirituality and existence elude me.

Why are we here?

What are we supposed to do in this life?

What happens when we die?

But these are the questions my mind finds its way back to again, and again, and again.

Now, as winter sets in, things slow down a little and nature hunkers down until it awakens again in spring. It is a time to think and plan for the coming seasons.  My mind settles on the deeper things in life, like Peace, Love, Joy and of course my garden.

Let’s talk about those deeper things that have become a focus of my thoughts. They are not easy to explain, but we’ll keep it simple.

Peace

A lot of different meanings here.
Quiet and Tranquility.
Freedom from civil disturbance.

Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards humankind.

On an individual level, I can be at peace with a decision, or at peace with the world.  In this way it is an acceptance of the world the way it is.  But generally when we talk about peace, we are talking about something belonging to a community or collective.

It is easier to explain what it is not than what it is.

On the collective level, peace is the absence of violence, strife, … tension.  I think of Peace as the collective decision to not violate “the others”.

Just because there isn’t war doesn’t mean there is peace.  When I am violating or even threatening the tranquility of a community,
I am disturbing the peace.

Peace is illusive because it depends upon groups to get along.
Peace is a gift that we give to each other.

Peace is about We.

Love

An intense feeling of deep affection.  I think that love is the strongest, the deepest and the most profound aspect of our spiritual being.  At least it is for me.

I was recently asked to define what I meant by love.

If I have to define love for you, this is a sad state of affairs indeed.

But as I thought about it, the closest I could come to defining love in my words was the bonding of two spirits.

There is the love of God, the love of another human, and the love for other creatures.   The reality is that love doesn’t have to be reciprocated.  I can love you and you not love me.

Under my definition you cannot love chocolate,  ((but I love chocolate ))
though you may use that word to describe a deep affection.  ((I love chocolate ))
And in my definition you cannot love yourself.  ((that is Narcissism))

Or, self-love is the state of self-respect and caring for oneself.
Self-love is your spirit embracing and respecting itself.

I love you.  You love me.
Ideally we both love each other.  I give my love to you.  Love is a thing that I give to you.
Love is about you.

Joy

A feeling of great pleasure and happiness.  Joy is the most transient, the most changeable and the quickest of the states we have discussed. Joy is a perspective, it is a conscious decision about how I am going to interpret and react to my circumstances.

The pure and simple delight in life and the world I live in.

Each day I make decisions about how I am going to proceed through the day.

Joy is a gift I give myself.
Joy is a gift you give yourself.

In that way, it is like a garden.

Plant kindness and understanding and Joy grows.  Fertilize with Love and Peace, and Joy thrives.  But you have got to pull the weeds.

Weeds take the energy that Joy needs to grow.

Dig out the hate to make room for joy.

Pull up jealousy and anger by the roots.

Don’t allow prejudice to invade the garden,
it is invasive and will choke out the joy
and may even spread to your neighbors.

Joy is a gift that I give myself
and it makes the world around me more beautiful.

Joy is about me.

We wish you all the joy of life,
but that of course is a decision that you have to make for yourself.

PEACE!

Categories: Love Peace Poetry

Tags: , , ,

We – Ploughshares to Swords

I’m not sure when it began

I think it was when We beat Them in the revolution
We mourned and celebrated our dead
We created a new society based on freedom and liberty and justice
We recognized and glorified the value of You and Me
And realized that our strength came from We

Doc

After We had beaten Them it was agreed that We would never be Them
We thought great thoughts and wrote them down as rules and laws
We built a great society
We valued You and Me
And We acted out of freedom and equality, for these are the things that We valued

I’m not sure when it began

I think it had been there all along
We slowly began to lose the way We valued You and Me
We forgot that our society was built on You and Me
We became We and They
And they acted a lot like Them.

For They there was no concern for We, only a focus on Me
They slowly took down the things that made the We society
They gathered great wealth and shut We out
They twisted the words that We used to speak
And here are some of the things that They did

They took away the ability to unite.
Because We can only prosper when it combines You and Me.

They sent the jobs overseas.
Because if I don’t have to pay You there is much more for Me

They found ways to buy representatives, officials and judges.
Because Now Government answers only to Me

They found ways to limit the Voting of We.
Because They didn’t want to hear the voice of We

They squandered our national resources and ran up great debt.
Because that allowed for collecting from We and giving to Me

They ignored the philosophies of freedom, liberty and justice.
Because They thought that those were not good for We, only for Me

They vilified ideas that were different from Me.
Because They thoughts are right thoughts so We thoughts can’t be

They attacked education.
Because We should not think.

And They got what they wanted
Because We did not speak

Along the way You and Me forgot that We could disagree
They grew angry and formed separate camps
They must think this way and They must think that
They are the left and They are the right
And stuck in the middle sit You and Me

I’m not sure when it began

I think it happened pretty quick
We remembered that We only exists with You and Me
We cried out to They, and They ignored We
We tried to restore the great society
And They fought it with every stride

They didn’t realize how much they had to lose
Because They didn’t know how much They had

They didn’t realize We had gotten so strong
Because for so long They focused only on Me

They seemed to think, that We were an inconvenience
Because focusing on We takes focus from Me

On the day the revolution began,
They grew angry, for
We didn’t have a permit for a revolution and
They felt We would interfere with their ability to enjoy the park
And They didn’t know that We had become Them!

And so the revolution began.

Kevin W. Tharp

Originally written Oct. 8, 2011 and posted to FaceBook.  This version changes one line to make it clearer:
edited Version: “Because They thought that those were not good for We, only for Me”
original version: “Because those were not good for We, only for Me”

Back from Hiatus

I am back.  I have had a long period when I did not post, August until now.  No excuses, I just didn’t write.  But now I am back.  I have some new projects going, and maybe along the way I will have some thoughts that are worth posting.

I’ll be back real soon, probably my next post will be about my adventure into building the systems to roast a whole hog.

Categories: Live Love Peace

Planning and building the Rocket Stove BBQ Grill prototype

The rocket stove in it’s purest form, is simply a high temperature combustion chamber and chimney through which a lot of air and a little fuel burn in an efficient manner.  The stove itself is this combustion chamber.  What you decide to do with the heat after it comes out of the chimney is extremely flexible and it depends upon how you direct and purpose the heat produced in the combustion chamber.

In the image below, you can see the rocket stove portion of my project.  I have made mine using two 6″ diameter stove pipe elbows to create the combustion chamber, and then an additional section of stove pipe for the chimney.

Rocket Stove basic element
Two elbows and a section of 6″ stove pipe make up the heart of the stove rocket stove.

Now, let me step back a bit and explain why I am doing this because frankly I spent quite a bit of time learning about rocket stoves.  The easiest way is probably to view this video.

So through the spring and summer of 2015, I learned about and tested the concepts of the rocket stove.  I wrote about the 4 brick rocket stove, and I wrote about the importance of the chimney in the rocket stove.  After those experiments I moved forward with the chimney, experimenting to come up with the combustion chamber and chimney shown in the first image above.  As you saw from the video, my motivation is to build a new  BBQ grill.  But if you know me, you know the straight and simple path is never the one I take.

My first thought is that if I just slap a grill on top of the chimney, it is going to be so hot that I just scorch anything that I put on that grill.  Take it from me, it gets really hot on top of that chimney.  So, my next thought was that I wanted to honor the meat I was cooking, so I would divert the heat so that it wasn’t just scorched meat, but something you would enjoy eating.

The cool thing about this rocket stove stuff, is that after the heat comes out of the chimney, it has to go somewhere.  It can go up, or it can go down, sideways or just about anywhere you direct it, but it has to go somewhere.  The whole idea of the rocket stove is that there needs to be a lot of hot air moving through the system.  That means that you can get creative, and that is what I did. In fact, every time I go out to use the grill, I end up coming up with a new configuration for my grill based upon what I am trying to do.  But that is another post.

So in the next video I give you an idea of what I have done as I fire up the indirect heat layout of my rocket stove grill for the first time.

Now we have fire going in the stove.  It will take a few minutes to warm up the combustion chamber and start really drawing the air in to get it to the point where it gets the roaring sound from which it gets the name rocket stove.  While we are waiting, lets take a look at some of the design elements that I have built into this stove that gives it the ability to cook with indirect heat, but also a look forward into the many options that you can bring to this kind of project.

One of the things you will notice is that I talk about needing to insulate the chimney and combustion chamber.  This is to help get the combustion chamber really hot without losing heat to the surrounding infrastructure.  In the literature I have read, they often talk about using Perlite.   I bought the only Perlite I could find, which was infused with Miracle Grow.  I was a little leery about that, but this was a prototype so I bought one bag and gave it a try.

Hot Dog cooked.
To test it, I threw some hot dogs on. It took a while, with hot dogs it might be better to use direct heat. But, it was successful.

I poured the Perlite down along the chimney and it settled to the bottom and down around the combustion chamber.  Then I fired it up and let it get hot.  I don’t know if it was my imagination, or if there was a strange smoky smell coming from where the Perlite met the chamber.  I didn’t want to take a chance of getting that into what I was cooking, so I made some home made insulation.  I took the ashes from my fire pit, and I sifted them to remove any debris.  Then I packed the granulated ashes in around the bottom and top of the combustion chamber and chimney to seal off the Perlite and finish the insulation process.  In the picture below you can see me adding the granulated ashes around the air and fuel intake portion of the stove.  This effectively ended the problem with the smell/smoke coming from around the chimney.

insulating the combustion chamber
In this image you can see the perlite surrounding the combustion chamber, and old ashes are being added to finish the process and seal off the perlite

Insulated chimney
Sifted / granulated ashes from fire pit used to fill in space around chimney as insulation.

With the stove now put together and properly insulated, it is time to put it to a real test.  In the next post, I will go into how I configured the system to serve as both a grill and cooked using a rotisserie simultaneously.  The imagination and how you will move the bricks to put heat on meat and vegetables is the only limit to how you can use the heat from this stove.

Categories: Rocket Stove

Rocket Stove Experiments – The importance of the chimney

In the last posting, I introduced you to my experiments with Rocket Stoves.  I started with the most basic, 4 brick rocket stove to introduce the concepts of the air and fuel intake chambers, the combustion chamber, and the chimney.  It is a simple burn process, input, combustion, output.

In this posting, I want to talk about the role of the combustion chamber and the chimney, because that is where all the real work gets done.  The combustion chamber is of course where the burning happens, and the chimney is where the smoke and flames go as the air rushes through the system.

It is important to understand at this point that a rocket stove works as efficiently as it does because it allows enough air to go through the system, and burns hot enough, to allow the fuel and the smoke to get burned in the combustion chamber.  The chimney is an extension of the combustion chamber, and it is essential to the process because it gives the fire enough time to consume the energy released in the smoke by burning it.  This process requires a very hot combustion chamber and chimney to be successful.

4 brick rocket stove with chimney
This is an experiment to see how adding a metal chimney affects the burning of the rocket stove.

This video shows what happens in the combustion chamber of the 4 brick rocket stove when the chimney is removed, when it is added back to the system, and when it is improved.

So from the video you can see that the enhanced chimney significantly increases the air flow and allows the smoke to burn off before exiting the chimney.  These are two crucial factors in creating an efficient rocket stove.

Since having a hot combustion chamber and chimney as extension of the combustion chamber is so important, the next thing to consider is finding a way to insulate around the combustion chamber and chimney so that the heat can remain in the chamber instead of leaching off through the surrounding materials.  I will explore this in later posts.

In the next post, I graduate from the 4 brick rocket stove to using a J shaped feed, combustion, chimney approach that is very common with rocket stoves.  The next posting is the last of the articles on testing, then in the article after that I proceed to an actual prototype.

Categories: Uncategorized

Learning about the Rocket Stove

I have been experimenting with Rocket Stoves in an effort to build a rocket stove BBQ grill.  Well actually, I want to use it for a bunch of different types of outdoor cooking.  This post will be the first in a series of posts that walk you through my experimenting with the rocket stove.

A rocket stove is an efficient cooking stove using small diameter wood fuel which is burned in a simple high-temperature combustion chamber containing a vertical chimney, which ensures almost complete combustion prior to the flames reaching the cooking surface. Wikipedia

My ultimate goal is to build a permanent installation with a rocket stove as the heat source, but with a number of different options for cooking.  These options could include a BBQ grill, indirect heat grill, rotisserie, burner, and maybe even a pizza or bread oven.  To do this, I am going to have to start small and build my personal knowledge.  I have done a lot of research along the way, and looked at a lot of other people’s designs.  If you are interested, the Design Principles at rocketstove.org is a good place to begin.   I begin with a 4 brick stove that I will discuss in this article, and end up with a relatively flexible system that allows me to adjust bricks to customize the way I use the heat.  Along the way, I will have a handful of articles where I will share what I have done and learned.  I hope you enjoy.

Four Brick Basic Rocket Stove

Let’s start this out by saying that I did not have a budget for experimenting with rocket stoves.  That doesn’t mean I had an unlimited budget, it means I had no budget.  Most of what I do is done with bricks and cinder blocks (concrete blocks) I had around the house.

The most basic design can be built using 4 concrete blocks.  It is a basic design that requires either an “H” block or, as I did, knock one end off of one of the blocks.

4 brick rocket stove design
This shows the basic 4 brick stove design.

The first brick is simply there as a base.  I placed it so the air chambers went from side to side.  On top of this, I placed another brick that I customized by knocking the end off so that I could create a right angle for the burn chamber.  In front of the first two bricks, another brick is placed standing on end so that the openings go from the front, forming the burn chamber with the section of the second brick with the end knocked off.  The fourth brick is used to create the chimney above the burn chamber.  In the picture I have it overlapping the second and third bricks.  I did this so that it stabilized all the bricks together.

Basic chamber view
The top opening of the brick standing on end creates the opening for the wood and entrance for the burn chamber.

In the image above, you can see the burn chamber.  The  wood is placed through the top hole in the brick placed on end and into the second brick through the space where the end was knocked off that brick.  From there, the heat and smoke go straight up the chimney and out the top of the stove.  In some of the things I have read and seen, they use a shelf that the wood sits on, and allows the air to go underneath the wood into the burn chamber.

Top front view
This image shows the stove with the additional air chamber installed.

In some of the things I have read and seen, they use a shelf that the wood sits on, and allows the air to go underneath the wood into the burn chamber.  This image and the next show this kind of design.  From what I have seen, there is some debate about whether this is the best way to do it.  I haven’t taken a scientific enough approach to this to be able to answer that question.  The important thing is that the air needs to have plenty of room to come into the burn chamber, past the ends of the wood that are burning in the burn chamber, then out through the chimney.

The key is to have enough air going through the burn chamber and chimney to burn very hot, and in the process burn the smoke so that almost no smoke ever comes out of the top of the chimney.  Again, there are a lot of opinions about the best way to do this, but the things that appear to be agreed on are that the burn chamber needs to get hot, and the fire needs to go up into a chimney and burn through the chimney.  In the best designs, most or all of the smoke will be burned, and that is where the efficiency comes from.  Smoke coming out the chimney represents wasted energy since it did not burn.

Burn chamber view
This shows how the shelf allows the air to come in under the wood.

From what I have learned, this L shaped burn chamber with the air coming in under the shelf gives the person running the stove the greatest control of the burn, and subsequently also is the most efficient.  The draw back is that the wood has to be constantly shifted to keep fresh wood in the burn zone.  I think overall, that is one of the greatest issues with the rocket stove.  Not a problem, just something that needs to be considered when you are designing your stove.

Fire coming from chimney
This one shows the fire coming out of the chimney.

One of the things that I found with the four brick stove is that it is hard to get the burn chamber hot enough to get to a point of efficiency.  In the next article, I will start working with the use of a tube inside the chimney to minimize the amount of block being heated up, and hopefully increasing the efficiency of the unit.

So, what I learned here, is that the most basic form of rocket stove will work.  I did not try using it for anything, but this model would be relatively limited, perhaps the best use would be for a burner.  It wouldn’t be big enough for grilling. In a later article I will build a prototype which will be  built around a J shaped intake, combustion chamber, and chimney.  In the next posting, we take a look at the role of the chimney.

Categories: reusing Rocket Stove