DIY Camping Stoves

The Fire arc wouldn’t have been Fire arc without… FIRE! The middle school students made three iterations of personal stoves for their Exploration project. The project included a beach field trip, candle making, water boiling and cooking pasta.

The first iteration was creating camping stoves out of soda cans. The middle school bands tested them in the backyard in a sea of tiny stoves and big cans of tomato soup and beans. The trickiest part was a sustained burn-- and not knocking an open can of soup onto the blacktop. Unfortunately the design didn’t quite go as planned and these stoves, while fun to light, did not stay lit long enough to boil water or melt wax.

After discussing what went well and what needed improvement, the students created another iteration. Our second attempt was to create a larger stove out of soup and canned fruit cans that would use wood fuel instead of liquid fuel. Nearly every student was able to get their stove not only started, but hot enough to boil water and then wax during an excursion to nearby Baker Beach. Ultimately, students made candle molds in the sand using cookie cutters, poured their melted wax, and were the proud creators of their very own sand candle.

For the third and final iteration, the middle schoolers generated design planning documents with annotated diagrams, materials lists, and illustrated step-by-step instructions. Rather than repeating the lumpy sand candles of the second iteration, the students worked on modeling with style. They learned some clay-modeling techniques and created multiple iterations of an animal candle out of Plastilina. During this process, they practiced giving feedback to each other to improve their model designs and learned about different methods to calculate volume, including displacement and geometric calculations. From those two elements, the students created mold boxes out of cardboard and measured the quantity of silicone they would need to mold their animals.

For the third round of the stoves, we used sheet metal rather than preconstructed cans. Students explored the basics of metalworking and riveting with Evan over a few sessions in the shop so that they could build their third iterations out of aluminum and metal rivets. They learned to use the metal shears and the rivet gun, and how to fold a two-dimensional pattern into a three-dimensional based on initial scale models of the stoves that used poster board and brass fasteners.

These third iterations were the most successful and most durable. The students successfully made homemade pasta using their stoves. Each team was able to boil water and cook pasta for an end-of-arc feast!