Stoves!

So, this weekend, my friend Isaac came over and we made some stoves. Before that, I tried to do some testing with a stove my friend Martin lent me, to see what we thought about the design options we had available. Here's how it all went down.

This is Martin's stove, nestled down inside my fire pit. It's a really awesome little stove, and very well made. If you aren't interested in building stoves and would rather buy one, this one is pretty awesome. Here's where you can get it: WhiteBox Stoves.

This is probably as good a time as any to explain how this works. The stove doesn't need a pot stand, doesn't need a priming pan. It's one little self-contained unit, which I think makes it perfect for putting into an emergency kit. All you do is fill it up with some fuel, then light it. The fuel will burn in the main chamber in the middle while it heats up the stove itself. Once the stove gets hot enough, the alcohol inside starts to boil, and the gas comes out the little holes on the side and ignites. Then you get this really pretty fire flower sort of effect. You put the pot on top and voila. All set. The reason I mention pot stands and priming pans is that some designs do need those things. A pot stand is basically just something to put the pot on so it isn't sitting on top of the stove directly. Some stove designs require air to flow in through the top, so you have to have a pot stand. Also, some stoves can't self-heat, so you have to use a wick or a priming pan to heat them up. For those, you put some fuel on the wick or in the priming pan and light that, and then that will burn and heat up the stove. It isn't the end of the world, but it's more pieces to worry about. This is an elegant design, I think.

This is my titanium cook pot. It's pretty awesome, and you can get it here: Ti Cookset It comes with the pot, the lid, a titanium spork and a bag to carry it all. I like it because it's a good size for boiling enough water to rehydrate a Mountain House meal or make hot cocoa or whatever, but it's not way bigger than I need.

This is the fuel we used for testing purposes. it's super cheap, you can get it anywhere, and it burns nice and clean.

I took pictures of the little stove without the pot on it, but you can't see the flames in the full sunlight so they're kinda dull. It was crazy windy out, so the poor stove kept blowing out, even inside the protection of the firepit. It still did get the water very nearly to boiling, though. In super-windy conditions, a windscreen would be very nice. I'm thinking about a design for one, and I'll post it up here if I get it figured out.

When Isaac came over, we wanted to do another test of the stove to make sure that it wasn't going out because the pot was suffocating it, so we did a burn in the garage and it worked beautifully. You can see the flame jets here pretty clearly.

Did you know Bud Light was available in aluminum bottles? Neither did I. Mostly because I don't drink beer and even if I did, I wouldn't drink Bud Light. But the bottle is very useful for this exercise, and so I bought some. The lady at the store asked "Is this any good?" and I said "I have no idea. I'm going to go home and pour it down the drain." Anyway, you take one of these bottles and empty it out in whatever manner pleases you most, then make some cuts in it. We used a large pipe-cutting tool (which you will have seen on my home improvement blog) to make the cuts and it seemed to work pretty well. I'm thinking we may just use the bandsaw for the cuts in the future, though. Anyway, you can decide how big you want your stove to be, and that will influence your cuts. We made ours roughly 2" tall, so we cut about 2 1/4" off the bottom and cut the top of the bottle off right where it stops curving down and goes straight into the sides of the bottle.

Now you want to prep the "top" which will become the inside of the stove. You cut the top down so from the wide part, it's about 2" long. The wide part will end up being up and will seal against the inside of the bottom of the bottle. The bottom part will rest against the bottom of the inside of the bottle. To provide a means for the alcohol to flow from the middle to the outer chamber, you need to make these little grooves in the neck part. We used a very small file. Just about anything would work. They don't have to be any particular shape, but keep them pretty small.

This is what I mean. You get the top turned over and stuck down inside here. This is all friction fit so there's no glue or rivets or anything. Again, it's a very simple, elegant design.

Now, we're rolling the edge of the outer piece over the top of the inner piece to lock them We used an aluminum bar fragment to kinda push them over and if I had it to do over again, I would've used a piece of wooden dowel instead. But still, it worked. We got our rolled edge and it actually looked okay. Not as pretty as the WhiteBox one by a long way, but not too awful, either. Essentially all I did was to use the bar to push the outer edge in and down so it folded over the inside layer. There's not a ton of finesse to it. After that, we put the stove down on the bench top and used the bar to squeeze down and smooth out the edge a bit.

We're drilling the holes. We waited until this point to do it for no real reason, and I think I'd prefer to do it before the inside piece is in for the future. Any little drilling particles that get inside would be much easier to get out that way. We also though the drill holes would be much larger than the thumbtack holes and so we spaced them farther apart. We didn't need to. They're actually very close to being the same size, so putting them as far apart as we did just meant less flame on the stove.

So there's our goofy little stove. it isn't perfect, but it's a decent first try.

And it's enough to boil some water.

So that's the end of that stove, and the end of this post. I'll write up the other stove tomorrow, hopefully.

Thanks for reading!