More for keeping warm than cooking, but with the addition of a steel plate or a grill on the top These would be fine for outdoor cooking.
I've been meaning to build one of these for ages but never got around to it. But I recently picked up a brand new set of steel wheels from someone who had mag wheels fitted to their new car. $10 for four wheels sounded like just the kick in the pants I needed to get this project started.
In my research (watching youtube
) I've seen a few designs but almost all of them left the wheels intact and consequently looked like a couple of old wheel rims stacked on top of one another. Pretty ugly look really.
Looking at the shape of the rims I realised that by cutting the outer rim off where it joins the hub it made a much nicer contour.
Two of these welded together were shaped like the body of a pot belly stove.
As a happy coincidence, the drop centre diameter of the 18" rims just fits nicely inside the rim diameter of a 13" wheel. Which also means that the cut off outer flange from the 16" wheel fits outside the 13"rim. That makes for quite a nice shaped base dor the body to sit on.
Dig out the welder and angle grinder and away we go...
There was one problem with using new rims. These (from a Hyundai) appear to be zinc plated and powder coated. Welding does not like either of those and even with grinding the immediate area the contamination from the adjacent plating/coating cooking off made for some pretty crappy welds. note to self for future; get rims sand blasted or use old junkyard rims with just paint.
After welding the various parts together I cut a door in the body and welded on some hinges.
A quick firing to burn off the powder coating (sorry for the stinky smoke neighbourhood
) and after cooling a quick clean and a coat of 1200 degree satin black stove paint and I think they are looking quite good.
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