Air vent stove from car rims

The inspiration for the stove came to me when I was watching a YouTube video of someone building a stove from rims by welding them together stacked on top of one another in the shape of a drum. Then, when I saw the profile and the depth profile, I had the idea of encasing the rims with sheet metal and to use the created hollow profile as air channels, in effect building a kind of Bullerjan air vent stove.

The first challenge was to clad the rims from the outside with a 2-mm metal sheet. It was important to bend the sheet metal in such a way that no dents or creases were formed on the surface. In particular, tacking the sheet metal strips flush turned out to be tricky, so I often had to undo the tacking because the sheet edge did not exactly follow the edge of the rim. Also, the exact arrangement of the rectangular pipes was not an easy task.

 

After the sheet metal cladding was finished, it was a joy to weld together the rims and sheet metal edges in one step using the rootArc process. At this stage it was particularly important to weld both sheets and rims in one work step, bridging all gaps. I adjusted the welding parameters so that a good root filling developed in the weld seam to give me a sealed combustion chamber.

Building this stove was a lot of fun. I was especially impressed with the versatility of the Picomig 355 puls. Whether I was working with forceArc with or without pulse or with the rootArc process, I always had the right settings for each welding task.