Hellfire Rocket Stove

[CS1983]

Yeah, it is heavy, but it breaks down to a bunch of flat pieces. It's probably not something you'd take if you're into ultralight camping gear and backpacking deep into the woods, but for car camping, short excursions, or a hunting trip where you set up a base camp, I think it will work well.

Indeed. If I'm living out of a ruck only, stuff got real enough that I'd probably be dead already anyway (or wouldn't care if I'm eating cold food). Otherwise, I'll probably be near my vehicle.

However, now that Hurley is in AZ, and has a sweet bike to do moto camping, 11lbs of stove is not a good use of his equipment weight budget.

[Justin]

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Hurley - this one is 3 pounds: https://www.virestove.com/product-page

Personally, I think having both wouldn't be bad. The lifetime savings on gas canisters would be good. Only bad thing is having to wait for the entire thing to cool down vs a typical backpacking gas stove where very little of it actually gets hot.

This video does a good job of showing how the stove works, also I had the same issue with knocking off the hinged cover for where the fuel goes in.

[Justin]

CS1983, that Virestove looks like a neat design. I like how it's all hinged and folds up vs. the Hellfire's "Tab A into Slot B" approach. If weight is an issue, that looks like it'd be a good choice.

[Justin]

Here's a picture of mine from the first time I cooked with it. It runs hot enough that you can get a good sear on the outside of a burger.

[CS1983]

Does it have instructions on best approaches for regulating heat output, or is this just fire up and go?

[Justin]

The instructions on mine are basically limited to a tag inside of the carrying bag for the stove that tells you to assemble it in the order of the numbers stamped on the pieces and that's pretty much it.

There's no instructions on how to regulate the heat output, it's basically just fire it up and go. The only thing I've noticed (and I've only used mine twice now, so I'm not an expert) is that it doesn't seem to burn quite as hot after awhile. I think this might be because I end up with kind of a bed of hot coals that are too big to fall through the grate into the ash collector beneath it and that this might be causing a problem with the air flow, but I'm open to suggestions.

[CS1983]

I'd assume there could be some regulation of heat via opening/closing the vents, though I'm not sure how much regulation would occur.

I'm curious as to what you're doing that you'd need the thing to be going for 40+ minutes.

[colorider]

From the pics and video, it looks llike the base could benefit from having a much wider footprint. It looks as if it could tip over really easily with a pan on it. Is it stable ?

[Justin]

I'd assume there could be some regulation of heat via opening/closing the vents, though I'm not sure how much regulation would occur.

I'm curious as to what you're doing that you'd need the thing to be going for 40+ minutes.

Oh yeah. In my picture you can't really see it, but there's a small vent with a piece of metal that you can rotate to allow more or less air flow as needed. You can also keep the ash removal door open for additional airflow as well.

As for the time needed, 40+ minutes is probably excessive, but after grilling the burgers I wanted to saute some zucchinis.

[Justin]

From the pics and video, it looks llike the base could benefit from having a much wider footprint. It looks as if it could tip over really easily with a pan on it. Is it stable ?

In my picture you can see there's a piece of metal near the back that extends off of the base to give it a wider footprint. That piece of metal extends to either side and aids in stability. With my cast iron pan I would describe the setup as being reasonably steady. It helps if you put it somewhere that's flat.