It kept riding up on me! I ended up putting the crucible in the inner bucket, and then filling that 2nd bucket on top full of water, just to try to keep the inner bucket from rising.

The floor was not level so I have improvised with a magazine. I want the top to be as level as possible so that I have no leaking heat and flames between the bottom and lid of this thing.

Thank goodness a friend told me about hitting the sides of the bucket. That got out a TON of air bubbles. It took forever, but it worked. Ramming alone did not do much at all.

My air pipe popped out after beating the sides so long. Thank goodness I saw that. It was nearly missed!

I had to pound it back in until I felt the wood. Without that, I'd have a worthless furnace.

I think I need to let this set up for like 48 hours, but I'm not entirely sure. I am definitely not going to get my inner bucket back, so I'm screwed if I need to do another one. Unless I can find an exact match again.

In hind sight, I would definitely go with 1 solid piece inside ...that way you don't have to mess with weighting it down so much.

I'm not sure what I'll use when I do this again, but it's going to be 1 solid piece... that I can assure you! It was such a pain in the ass to deal with the bucket inside rising up like that.

The perfect thing would be to find a bit taller bucket, and then on the bottom simply screw through it and attach a piece of wood for the "spill gutter" and then a peg for the center hole. The peg works quite well, and I use magnet wire buckets, so they have that little nipple inside at the bottom. If I had a regular bucket, I would use a bit longer dowel for the bottom hole, and just screw it directly to the outer bucket with a screw right up from the bottom.