Stainless Steel Scrap and wood burning appliances.

I like to play with fire, and I like to make things.
Stainless steel resists  a lot of heat.
I scavenge hotel pans, stock post, mixing bowls, refrigeration devices, ovens, sinks, anything I can and try to us them.
So far, my best usage has been stockpots as TLUDs(Top Lit Up Draft)charcoal making stoves.

Right now I'm trying to use them in various forms of griddle.
My propane grill is really beat up, and replacing the grill surface with a griddle has a strong appeal.
Full size hotel pans have relatively large flats surfaces.
They may or may not warp over direct flame.
I will try this soon.

Meanwhile, when I Googled "Hotel Pan Griddle", I found other cool stuff.

This one is a back packing stove made of hotel pans:


Here's a tent stove:


This one is made from a sink, but you can see the parallels.



This is a campfire pizza oven


Here is another:



So with these inspirations, I want to make a griddle that can be fired by a a variety of heat sources.
The campfire pizza ovens are my starting point.
By mating two pans back to back, like they do I'm pretty confident that the warping will be minimal.
Instead of cooking underneath, with coals on top, I will be cooking in the top pan, with a TLUD beneath.
I want to uses the lower pan as an open bottom  bell, or heat accumulator.
The heat source would be under one end , and the exhaust at the other.
I'm leaning towards an exhaust that passes through the cooking surface itself, so I can put a lid on my griddle and turn it into a black oven.
It will also be a place for grease to drain from the griddle.

I hope to have a proto type to share very soon, and I hope to other ideas here.

I've built nothing yet, but I did throw two different full size hotel pans on the grill.
The first was 2.5" deep.
After it was hot enough to evaporate drops of water, I poured a full cup on it.
It didn't bend or warp in any appreciable way.

I did the same with the 1" deep pan.
That one warped noticeably, with two of the corners lifting up towards each other.

Since each pan ses to be roughly the same gauge of thickness,  I presume it's the raised edges that are keeping the deeper pan from warping.


I tried a spatula with both pans.
The 2.5" sides were an impediment, the one inch sides not so much.
Griddles have one  side with little or no vertical edge, so I will cut down one side of the pan down to 1".
I'm hoping the pan will remain warp resistant despite this.

I think there will be two or three different griddles before I am donen  one as a portable grill topper, one as a permanent grill top, and one for use with fire.

This is a nice black oven build:

Not a griddle, but definitely a wood burning appliance made from stainless steel  scrap: