Hey guys, I'm a welcome back to the workshop everyone loves a good bonfire
Whether it's hot or cold outside
But sometimes it doesn't make sense to really get a giant fire going the purpose of today's video is to see if we can build
A portable tabletop fire pit that we can move around with us
This is a slightly more complicated build than some so we do have quite a few parts that are going to be working with for
The main body of the fire pit we have this
medium-sized plastic container and a metal pie tin as the fuel for our tabletop fire pit
We have this little canister of propane butane mix usually these are for powering camping stoves when you go hiking
speaking of camp stoves
We have a small one of those we bought on Amazon that we're going to
Disassemble to use as a regulator to get the fuel out of our tank we have a bunch of paint sticks that are going to
Use to decorate the outside of our container once everything is built
Then we've got some of these blue glass beads that we can use as a decorative element to make the top of our fire pit
Look a lot nicer for the workings of our fire pit
We have some quarter inch copper tubing and some
copper fittings as well as a small piece of
3/8 inch vinyl tubing the rest of what I have here is hardware and supplies to attach the other pieces together
And I'll go over those as I get to them. We've got all of our supplies and equipment ready
Let's start building the first step in building is actually going to be
disassembling some of the parts that we have our plastic container has a lid and a latch that we aren't going to need so let's
Just take them off
Now let's take the camp stove out of the box and break it down to just the parts that we need pretty neat little stove
collapses down really small
Now what we want is this orange part down at the bottom that works as regulator for the fuel
The rest of this stove we actually aren't going to use
Just by grabbing this top part. I'm able to twist and this will unscrew from the regulator
That's done. Everything else is sort of connected to it
There's also this little brass nozzle at the tip of our stove and that helps regulate the speed at which the fuel comes out
Normally, that's a good thing
But we want the fuel to come out a little bit faster than this nozzle is designed to allow
So let's remove it as well. Let's secure that in the vise now. I'm just gonna take a pair of pliers
That is pretty stuck on there, but is removable
It's enough force pull these really tiny I can't tell maybe they're brass rods or brass beads
They're super little now we have the piece of the regulator that we want to use on our fuel canister this regulator
Just screws right down onto our fuel canister
And then we can open and close it as we like at this point if we twist this handle right here
Fuel will start coming out, but I don't really just want to spray propane and butane in the air
So I'm not going to do that at the moment
We're going to want our metal pan to be nice and secure in its attachment to our plastic container
But we don't want it permanently affixed because that would make it impossible to switch out the fuel if we run out
What we're going to do is we're going to take four of these metal brackets
And we're going to have a magnet attached to the top of each one of them
We also have an assortment of these small machine bolts
And we're going to use these to attach the magnets permanently to the brackets
And then we'll also use them to attach the brackets to the plastic container
With the magnet on the bracket one of those screws passing through the magnet and the bracket going to attach a washer
And then a nut to keep it nice and secured in place
Feels nice and secure now let's do the same thing for the other three brackets
Now we need to attach our four brackets at four equal points around our plastic container
With those four points marked on the side of the plastic container
Let's drill four small holes one at each point just large enough for our small screws to fit through
It's fun little spiral plastic pieces
I'm trying not to press too hard because I really want it to cut through the plastic rather than breaking through at the end
Now we should be able to line our brackets up with those holes and attach the screw
Right in place to help make sure the screws don't damage the plastic
I do have some rubber washers that I'm going to use
I just want to make sure I don't crack through the side of the plastic when I tighten down the bolts the head on these
Screws is pretty small, and if I try I can actually pass it through the rubber washer
So I'm going to be using a regular washer first, and then the rubber washer
That's lately attached, I'm not going to tighten it down quite yet, so at the moment this bracket can still move around fairly freely
Let's attach the other three the same way there we go
We've got all four brackets loosely attached to our plastic container, and here's why we didn't anchor those down really firmly yet
I want to make sure that they all sit perfectly level with each other
Let's take our plastic container flip it upside down and secure it to the bottom of our metal pan
We can just as easily
Flip it right side up and we can get a good look at how this is going to work
And you can see that the magnets are providing a really strong attachment
Which is just what we want with our magnets attached to the bottom of the pan
We know that all four are sticking up from the plastic
Container the same amount we're not going to end up with three of them in contact and one of them with a small gap
With our brackets measured out, so we know they're at the right height. Let's tighten down the bolts
There we go
At this point we should be able to pull our pan off
Our brackets will stay in place and now we know that we put our pan back on
It will be in good contact with all four brackets at once
And it's very well attached
But we can still take it off
And we need to to change out the fuel the next step is we're going to prep our copper tubing and how it's going to
Attach to our metal pan the tubing will be coming straight up the middle of our plastic container
So let's drill a hole in the center of our pan to let it come through to find the center of this pan
I'm going to just try and balance it on the tip of a pen until it's staying in one spot
That'll let me know where the middle of the pan is
There we go, we've got a balance point
If we're off by a couple of millimeters here there. It's really not gonna make a difference so this point will work
We want to drill a hole
That's big enough that the widest part of our quarter inch copper elbow fitting will fit through the hole
It's so close so you can see that the drill bit fits inside the copper fitting right there
Which makes sense because it's designed to fit 3/8 inch pipe here. Let's try the next size up it might be too large
Definitely big enough, but it's really a lot more than we want so I think
let's take our 3/8 inch drill bit and
Then we'll just sort of wiggle it around inside the pan a little bit to open up the hole
Here we go
Beautiful our copper fitting now fits through that hole. Let's look at the layout
We're gonna want for our copper pipes our vinyl tube fits perfectly into this three-eighths to 1/4 inch copper adapter
It's a pretty snug fit, too
So I'm really not worried about any gas leaking out of it the fuel will travel up the tube through this copper fitting
We'll have another piece of copper connecting these two then we'll have this elbow
Which will run out another straight piece of copper tube connected to that will be a second elbow?
We'll have a nice tight circle of copper tubing that comes back to about right here to be finished off with an end cap
Let's start by bending the copper tube that we need in our circle and cutting that off
I got this copper pipe at Lowe's it came in a coil about three. Maybe four feet long and a cardboard box
I think it was about five bucks copper is very flexible which makes it easier to bend into a circle
But you do have to be careful because if you bend it too aggressively
It will kink in the middle, and then the gas won't be able to flow through the piping well
I want a nice clean edge to start our copper pipe so first
I'm just gonna cut this off using a hacksaw should want to be pretty gentle
Putting in the vise because since copper is so soft it
Could very easily get squished in the vise here. I just want it to hold it in place
There we go we have a much cleaner edge on this now
let's just take a file and clean it up a little bit more -
If we've cut the end of our pipe off nicely it should fit into the end of our elbow piece
Perfect with the end of our pipe cut we now want to bend it into a circle with a diameter of four to five inches
You can see that the copper pipe is fairly easy to bend even with just your hands
You can also see that as unbending it. It is getting narrower than it is when it's unbent
This is what I meant when I said you have to be careful if you were to bend it too hard
We would get a kink in the pipe there. We go. I think that's bent into a pretty good circle
It's fairly tight it hasn't kinked too badly. I do have one spot here where it started to smash the tube
I'm going to see if I can use a pair of pliers and get that out a little bit
It shouldn't cause any problems
It's definitely still wide enough that the gas can flow through it
But just to make it a little bit nicer see if we can bring that back out a little
Okay, I think that popped out a little bit now we want to cut off the excess of our copper pipe
Let's do that right about there. I didn't really like using the vise on the copper
I thought it was pinching it a little too much
So I'm just gonna try and hold it down using this wooden block in my own bodyweight
Of course I should be using a pipe cutter rather than a hacksaw, but I don't have one
Let's just use our file and clean up that edge a little bit
Alright and our cap fits nicely on the end of that now we need to cut off a section of our quarter inch copper pipe
to connect these two pieces
There we go that's a pretty nice straight section of pipe, so we'll cut out the rest of our fittings from that part
We've got our little fitting of course let's take our file and clean it up so it fits nicely into both of our pieces
That it looks good
There we go both pieces are fitting just the way we want them to
With our regulator in place our 3/8 inch vinyl tubing should fit very snugly over the nozzle in fact
It's snug enough that when I twist it
I can get it to fit down onto the threads and that actually helps tighten it into place the reason
I'm using vinyl tubing instead of metal hardware is that I could not find any other metal hardware that fit nicely
Onto this thread it seems to be a size that doesn't conform the standard threading so clearly we have way more
Tubing that is going to be necessary in fact
I think we want to cut it down so it's only about three quarters of an inch tall
It's nice and snug
Into our copper there we go
And if we drop that down into the bottom of the container
We can see how long of a fitting we need to connect from the source of the fuel up into our metal Pam
I'm gonna do a little test I cut this one-inch piece to connect our elbow into our circle
I'm gonna see if that's close to the right size to connect these other two pieces
This length of pipe does seem to be working
But this particular piece of pipe is only
Barely inside this connection point so I'm going to measure this pieces length, and then cut another piece. That's about 1/4 inch longer
All right fits there pretty nicely
Magnets
Looks like it fits there great -
That looks like a perfect fit
We've now got all of our pieces cut out shaped and ready to assemble so come back tomorrow
It will show you how to permanently attach them all together and form them into a beautiful tabletop firepit
Thanks for joining us for the first half of this video
Don't forget to come gear yourself up with products and merch at the king of random calm. See you there
Hertz
In the meantime remember in the meantime rip remember I can't say the word remember
Hey guys
Thank you for your comments so many of you have really interesting
Suggestions for projects and experiments, and we love testing those out for you. I also wanted to say thank you for the great feedback
You're leaving for me and my team because we are all in this together, so thank you for being on our team