Design Challenge Odds and Ends & Video

We haven’t posted much this week because we’ve been so busy!  It’s getting cold and we have to take care of our customers (who all wait until the first frost to order stoves, ask for advice, or order parts).

We are scheduled to send our Design Challenge stove out for EPA testing at the end of next week, so we’ve been doing final tweaks to the combustion design and sending the stove through our internal testing regime most of this week - continuing into next week.  We should have EPA test results around October 16-17, and will publish the results here.  We expect quite good results.
 There’s a short video below of part of today’s high burn test.

The picture below shows the test cutting of the Fleur-de-Lis for the Kopp family.

Trial cut for the Fleur-de-Lis

Trial cut painted gold

We also cut a detachable Fleur-de-Lis pattern that allows for easy changes of color, and future changes of design.  You can see it below on one of our test stoves.  A lot of our employees are designing their own stoves, and we’ll start posting some of those designs next week.  We also hope some of our prospective beta testers will contact us with their ideas!

Detachable Fleur-de-Lis pattern on the end of the stove allows
for color changes and design changes.  (pardon the obvious mismatching colors in this test stove)

We’re having fun with this stove!  More to come next week.  Have a pleasant weekend!

Beta Testing CUSTOM STOVE ART with the Kopp Family

Click image to enlarge

The Woodstove Design Challenge has focused our attention on questions that we hadn’t really addressed before:

1. Can we make a really high performance woodstove that is completely affordable?
2. We don’t have the chutzpah to think we can produce a stove design that will make everyone happy.  So, how do we make a flexible design that can harness our owners’ creativity?
3. How can we have fun with this product? How can our owners have fun too?

Under the Hood 6: Smoke-free front loading

The Design Challenge Stove is carefully engineered for smoke-free loading even under marginal draft conditions:

Under the Hood 5: Secondary Combustion Chamber

The Design Challenge Stove has a sloping secondary combustion chamber, which has two big advantages:

Two Recent Items from the Mail Bag...It's what keeps us going.

First, one of our young customers recently sent us a note and some pictures that we just had to share.

Under the Hood 4: Catalyst Air: we apply an old idea in a new setting

On our design challenge stove, we have added “catalyst air” - an air intake controlled by a self adjusting bi-metallic coil which feeds a perforated stainless steel tube located behind the catalyst. Here’s the dilemma “catalyst air” is designed to solve:

Under the Hood 3: Andirons- movable, removable, customizable

Our andirons are custom cut from 1/2” plate steel, and mounted on a thick hinged plate.  When the loading door is closed, the andirons are locked in place by a security tab on the door.

Your choice of andirons- or you can design your own! A small sample is shown above.