Alcohol Stove
Tonight I built a simple little alcohol stove. The ultralight backpackers seem to all love these things and they are very simple to make. Basically you take two bottoms of a pop-can and slide them together, and you punch or drill some holes into the ridge along one side and punch a slightly larger fill hole in the top but in the center of the depression.
The assembled canister is about 1.5 inches tall with about 20-30 little pin holes around the top to act as jets. The theory behind these things is that you fill the little canister up with about 1 ounce of alcohol fuel, the red bottles of HEET work, as well as many other types of alcohol products. You don’t store the fuel in there, but rather in a seperate small bottle, and fill the stove as needed.You dribble a little alcohol under the can after it’s filled. Then cover the fill hole with something like a quarter. Then light the alcohol on the ground and it will heat up the can and the fuel inside the can. Once the alcohol starts to heat up it will produce copious amounts of vapor and the vapor has to escape out of the many little jets in the top of the canister. This vapor is of course ignited by the priming flames from the alcohol that was spilled on the ground. After the priming fire goes out the jets stay lit because the flames from the jets continue to heat up the alcohol inside the canister enough to maintain the evaporation rate needed.
One ounce of alcohol burns up in about 10 minutes. Here on a nice warm night down at 6,000 feet the thing worked like a charm and was able to boil 2 cups of water in our camp cook-pot in less than 5 minutes. The aluminum reflector base and windscreen that came with our MSR Whisperlite Intl’ should work great with this little stove too. One other thing that needed to be added was a pot stand, I fashioned a rough tripod out of a coat hanger, but it seems to be getting pretty soft and warping from the heat of the stove. We’ll see. This project is ridiculously cheap, and the only thing that costs money is the alcohol. And some types of alcohol can be used as an antiseptic as well as fuel on the trail, so that’s a plus, and it costs relatively little compared to many cooking solutions.
My plan is to take this along as a secondary stove on our next trip and see if it performs in real world conditions. I have my doubts, since the pressurized canister stoves like the MSR Superfly don’t work at all up at 10-11k feet in the evening temperatures. We’ll see if the rediculously light alcohol stove is really a viable replacement for my white-gas burning flame thrower that I have come to love.