As I was riding my bike to work yesterday looking at all the beer cans along the road and daydreaming about making alcohol stoves, I had an epiphany!
I love the idea of simple and cheap. It just warms my heart . . . even if my gear room, gear basement, and gear shed, all full of high end gear, are the joke of the family. Regardless, the simplest DIY stoves are high on my daydream list. And, I may have just come up with a beauty.
This is essentially a Fancy Feast stove with all its attributes of fast (for an alcohol stove), fuel efficient (for an alcohol stove), wind resistant (for an alcohol stove) and a built in pot support. Frankly, my favorite of all the alcohol stoves around.
BUT, this FFF Knock-off only needs one beverage can (preferable a nice amber or nut brown ale) and a friggin paper napkin . . . and nothing else! And, it can be built with nothing but a pocket knife in less than 3 minutes. After showing it to a colleague yesterday, he suggested I could just throw it away after every use and build a new one for each meal. That way I'd be truly ultra-light!
Anyway, as I've suggested in the past, paper makes thoroughly acceptable wicking material in Fancy Feast stoves and doesn't burn up as one might think.
The only down side I've found with this stove is that if you let it burn for a while without the pot on top deflecting the flame outward, you can overheat the relatively thin pot support part of the stove causing it so get soft and bend. So keep the pot on the stove when you're using it.
Have fun and let me know what you think.
FFF Knock-off.jpg