I had an opportunity the first weekend of Feb 2022 to join a college friend in Wild River State Park in Minnesota for some hot tent camping! This has been on my list ever since I purchased an old canvas tent at a swap meet a couple years ago. Before we could head out, I has 1 week to install a stove jack and build a wood stove for the tent, plenty of time as long as Amazon didn’t let me down! (and they didn’t)
I went with this stove jack and used Tear Mender to seal the stove jack against the tent. I (or rather my wife) cut out a square equivalent to the size of the gray fire resistant material and had about a 2 inch overlap of fabrics for the adhesive to hold, and it holds amazing! So much so that we didn’t feel the need to stitch it down.
The next time I will move the jack further up the roof line. I would put it about 1/3 of the way up the roof to keep the stove away from the wall. At the moment the hole is 18″ from the door and 18″ from the wall. Having the stove near the door is nice so you aren’t hauling wood across your tent.
Since I build sauna stoves, throwing together a wood stove to use in the tent isn’t a big deal. I did some research and started with this as an initial design
I welded in a couple of baffles to make sure embers wouldn’t pop out the air vent, and over the flue exit to avoid embers coming down on the tent.
My friend Mike met me at the trail head with sleds to help haul the gear into the camp side. My daughter Sadie that paints the sauna stoves for me was my camping buddy for the weekend! We shoved out a spot for the tent so that we were not up on snow.
Once everything was all setup, we fired up the stove and started warming the tent up. Next year I am going to build an internal frame for the tent so that I having something that is supported better and the door hangs better. As it was we had a gap in the door all night. We didn’t have to worry about bugs, but it did prevent the tent from heating up as much as it could.
I kept a put of water on the stove both for a heat mass, but also so there was always hot water for coffee and hot chocolate. Some of the other guys were burning these things called eco blocks that you can find a building centers like Menards. They burn pretty well, but take some tending to make them burn completely.
We had a good time camping with friends and family, we stayed warm and got some sleep. For my next stove build I am going to make the stove 16″ long. I made this one only 14″ long which would be fine if I was cutting the wood, but since we were in a State Park I had to buy it, and that it was too long for my stove.