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Got a little more work done yesterday. I got a wild hair and built a nicer fire pit. The goal here was to build a fire pit with sufficient air intake to have a cleaner burning, more efficient fire that produced minimal smoke. Based on the first fire I made last night it was a success. Even with slower burning hickory and red oak it produced very little smoke and the smoke that it did produce seemed to go straight up faster.

What you'll see in the first pic is a section of gutter down spout that I buried. The other end extends out to the rock retaining wall where it draws in a pretty large volume of fresh air.



Here's the completed fire pit area. More wood Adirondacks to come. I'll be working on the new templates today before settling in for a beer (or 6) and some football...



Here's a pic of the first fire. It starts fast and burns hot. You'll notice I re-purposed the existing fire bowl from the chitty little Walmart fire pit. I did this for several reasons:

1. I can easily pick it up and dump out the ashes. This keeps the bottom of the fire pit from becoming a soggy mess that makes it much harder to start a fire in less than favorable conditions.
2. The domed screen can still be used allowing me to go to sleep and cover the coals at the end of the evening.
3. In theory the fire bowl creates sort of a plenum. I drilled 1/2" holes all around about 3 inches from the upper edge and these act like jets drawing fresh air to the fire.

I'll probably partially disassemble the thing and mortar the stones together so the only air being drawn into the lower plenum area will be through the down spout.

All that to say it works, it looks good and I'm pretty happy with it.

A fire is good quality entertainment.