Cone solar cooker design and construction videos

While designing, making and using my cone solar cooker for the first time I took lots of video. I whittled it all down to what you see below. Enjoy!

Part 1 - The finished product - cooking rice on my solar cooker

This shows my first time using it; I cooked long grain brown rice. It worked like a charm! And from the tone of my voice in the video, you can tell I was excited.

Part 2 - I start with a bowl - my first steps in design and construction

I started with a big metal kitchen bowl, made an insulated box, some glazing, and did my first tests with just that. You may want to skip this video if you want to get to the more exciting design and construction of the cone reflector in part 3.

Part 3 - Designing and making the cone reflector

Originally planning to use four flat mirrors, this video shows the tests that made me realize I should use a cone instead. Then it goes on to show the calculations used to design that cone followed by its construction and first assembly.

Note: The following video shows the segments/panels being connected together with duct tape. It turned out that the duct tape didn't hold on very well in the summer heat and so I removed the duct tape and used string instead, as shown in the photos below the video.

As stated above, the duct tape failed to hold the segments/panels together in the summer heat so I switched to using string instead, except for one set where I tried fishing line. Time will tell if either is not a good approach.

Two segments/panels connected with string.

Two segments/panels connected with fishing line.

Adjacent segments attached in three places.

The materials used.

Part 4 - Designing and making the cooking table - or "how to make things using aluminium flashing"

I settled on using a cooking table inside the bowl to sit my cookware on while cooking. Here I show how I prototyped and made that table. This also shows how useful and easy to work with aluminium flashing is.

How to make a sun finder

A solar cooker works best when aimed at the sun. There are many ways of doing this and this video shows one way I came up with, even before making my first solar cooker. I made a sun finder first because I new it would be handy when designing the cone reflector. You can see more about it on my sun finder page.