I have been using a Kifaru teepee and stove for the past year and find it an excellent peice of kit for scottish winters, the only thing that i was wanting to improve was the burn time of the stove and i realised to achieve this i would need to make an air tight stove. After looking about various sites in the US and discovering the carraige charges on such a stove would be in excess of $120 !!!! more than the cost of the stove.......I decided to build my own
Using 0.8 and 1.2mm 304 Stainless Steel which i bought and had bent by a local supplier ( although you could buy a cheap bender and bend it yourself as all the bends are just easy 90 degrees)
Assembly took about 10 hours, all joints were sealed with exhaust assembly paste and bolted together so that if need be the stove could be disassembled for repair at a later date.
This is the stove afters its first burn to set the assembly paste, all went well apart from the door warps slightly when hot and the bolt wont fasten but it doesnt appear to effect the performance other than letting in some air but with the vents shut it seems to tick over nicely. I may attempt to solve this by stiffening up the door but i will see how it runs first.
The first field test was at Braemar
With the chimney fitted the stove ran really well, burning of the wood was far more controllable than with my kifaru stove and with it fully loaded with fuel would burn happily away for well over an hour with heat still being produced up to 2 hours later, i was lucky to get 45 minutes out of the kifaru stove.
Water was boiled on the stove in less than 5 minutes something which can take up to 20 minutes on the kifaru stove due to the fact that the top on the kifaru stove warps during use and leaves an air gap between the stove top and the pot making it very hard to boil water.
I have just to make up some steel legs for the stove to finish it off, i was using green sticks for the test so that i could play about with the hieght of it before making legs.
All in all it is fairly easy to make the only tools i used were a power drill, jig saw with metal cutting blade, hack saw and that was about it. A cheap and very effective stove. I used the chimney from my kifaru stove just because it is so light and i love the design but i am sure that sections of pipe could be bought to do the same job.
Michael

Using 0.8 and 1.2mm 304 Stainless Steel which i bought and had bent by a local supplier ( although you could buy a cheap bender and bend it yourself as all the bends are just easy 90 degrees)
Assembly took about 10 hours, all joints were sealed with exhaust assembly paste and bolted together so that if need be the stove could be disassembled for repair at a later date.

This is the stove afters its first burn to set the assembly paste, all went well apart from the door warps slightly when hot and the bolt wont fasten but it doesnt appear to effect the performance other than letting in some air but with the vents shut it seems to tick over nicely. I may attempt to solve this by stiffening up the door but i will see how it runs first.

The first field test was at Braemar
With the chimney fitted the stove ran really well, burning of the wood was far more controllable than with my kifaru stove and with it fully loaded with fuel would burn happily away for well over an hour with heat still being produced up to 2 hours later, i was lucky to get 45 minutes out of the kifaru stove.

Water was boiled on the stove in less than 5 minutes something which can take up to 20 minutes on the kifaru stove due to the fact that the top on the kifaru stove warps during use and leaves an air gap between the stove top and the pot making it very hard to boil water.
I have just to make up some steel legs for the stove to finish it off, i was using green sticks for the test so that i could play about with the hieght of it before making legs.
All in all it is fairly easy to make the only tools i used were a power drill, jig saw with metal cutting blade, hack saw and that was about it. A cheap and very effective stove. I used the chimney from my kifaru stove just because it is so light and i love the design but i am sure that sections of pipe could be bought to do the same job.
Michael