Steel Chiminea - Steel Fire Pit
Late this past summer, listed a little steel geometric fire pit on a local Minnesota marketplace webpage to see if I would get any bites for it. At first I received very few inquiries, but as the temperature has been in freefall, the requests have been exploding…many of them for completely custom fire pits of varying sizes and shapes, but the one I’m writing about today has earned an honorable mention, because it’s not a simple steel fire pit…it’s a 6 foot tall custom steel chiminea, and it was a heck of a lot of fun to make.
Planning can get dicey, in any trade or craft, when you start playing around with a lot of geometry…this becomes doubly so when the material of your trade is steel. Mistakes aren’t just unforgiven…they’re downright punished, and fixing them takes a heck of a long time. That’s where CAD and 3d render programs come in! This takes damn near all the guess work out of the fabrication process. To get to a 3d computer render, a sketch is helpful; here’s what I started with. s
As hand sketches go, this one was EXCELLENT to work with, especially for such a geometrically-heavy fire pit design as this.
Standing out to me in this design was the chimney flue - I’d never seen one incorporated into an outdoor fire place, and it wasn’t clear what sort of mechanism to use - one that would be robust enough to survive winters in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, but not be overly clunky. A few washers and a spring ended up being the hero of this part of the story.
Moving from my client’s great little sketch to a fully realized 3d render was an absolute breeze…I did need to revisit some high school trigonometry to figure out all of the angles, but a quick Google search solved all of my mathematical trepidation.
My program of choice is Fusion360; jumping from a render to a file that a CNC laser can cut is no struggle at all.
As a final product, the chiminea build went well…the greatest limitation being that the whole thing weighed about 180 pounds, and was 6’ tall…moving the pieces around my shop, on and off the weld table, was a bit of a chore (it might be just about time to hire on an extra set of hands.) That aside, this was a great build that I would be excited to do again. If you’re lookin for a custom outdoor fire place, a chiminea, or a fire pit, please let me know…I’d love to hear your ideas.
