Story Break
Things You Can Make Stoves From
Prologue
Before you start your homemade stove project there are some things to think about. (If thinking causes gas, headaches, dizziness, marital difficulties, or malfunctions in one more internal organs, then skip this and go on to something else.)
There’s no perfect place to start your thinking, so I’ll pick one for you.
Do you have dependents? Anyone who counts on you? Like children who haven’t made it through school yet, who haven’t yet begun lives of joyous independence? A spouse? Loving pets? If you beat your cat, then ignore this part. Fluffy will be better off without you, if she hasn’t left already. And your cat will, too, in case Fluffy is your wife. Let’s assume that your cat is named Bert.
Cats lean toward independence, in most cases, and Bert does too. Contrary to popular belief cats named Bert aren’t all that good at taking to the woods and fending for themselves. Having been brought up to depend on people for food, shelter, and a clean place to poo, a cat grows to expect these things, plus a little respect if possible, and an occasional pleasant brushing.
That is, most cats. With cats you can really get into trouble if you generalize too much. Any cat, though, will abandon you in a heartbeat if your manners are lacking. So if you find that your cats always seem to move in with the neighbors and only glance at you from time to time through the window glass, then maybe now is a good time to reevaluate that psychotherapy option. Look in the mirror. If someone scary is looking back, then phone for help.
All right, we’ve got some of the preliminaries out of the way. You either do or do not have dependents, and if so, you are thinking about them. Making your own stove can be safe, but life being what it is, it’s better to prepare for the worst.
First, determine that your life insurance policy is up to date. There is a chance, however small, that you are dangerously stupid, but there is no reason that any of your dependents should suffer because of you. Gary is a good case study.
Gary should never try to make a backpacking stove. Gary probably should never try backpacking, unless under close supervision, with physical restraints nearby. As Hurricane Bob approached (a recent, famous storm as such things are reckoned was Bob), Gary went home to wait it out. Gary lived in Connecticut, a state not often appearing in the headlines during hurricanes, so we’ll give Gary some credit for being cautious. Good boy, Gary.
When the hurricane hit and the power went out, Gary was ready. Gary had water. Gary had food. Gary had a kerosene lamp. Best of all, Gary had a trusty old camping stove, a white-gas model that would see him through the worst of it. And it did. When the power went out as he had been warned it might, Gary put the camping stove on top of his kitchen range and cooked supper by lantern light. And then, satisfied, Gary turned off the camping stove, ate supper, cleaned up, and went to bed, well-fed and satisfied. Gary had coped.
Since Gary lived in Connecticut and not Florida, the storm blew over quickly and soon dozens of conscientious workers were out repairing the electric lines. The damage had not been catastrophic. Crews worked busily throughout the dark hours, and restored power to Gary’s place while he lay in bed asleep, with his little eyes closed. A burner on the electric range began heating up. And then camping stove sitting on top of that burner on the range began heating up.
It did this because Gary had tested the electric burner on his range by turning it on, to prove to himself that the power had really gone out, all of it, not just the lights. And because the burner was switched on the way Gary had left it, poor fellow, it heated up when the power came back on. And all too soon the camping stove exploded, destroying Gary’s house, though Gary did survive, his eyes now opened wide.
One of his close relatives may be now living in the apartment below you. Think about it for a while.
Gary wasn’t all that ambitious. You couldn’t call him a real do-it-yourselfer. Unlike Anne and Ralph.
Dear Anne and Ralph.
Anne and Ralph really did play with fire, in the house, and it was fun for a while. They bought a wood-burning stove and installed it themselves. The chimney too. The chimney went through the ceiling and into the attic.
But no farther. Because Anne and Ralph got tired of working and stopped, wanting to spend some quality time in front of a cozy fire. Which they did, for a while. Leaving the chimney running up from the stove into the attic, and stopping there, where it vented inside their house. They did have quality time, but only a little of it. Their quality time ended when the attic caught fire and burned them out. No one had spanked them for playing with fire as children. They got to learn the fun way, the expensive way, as adults.
Potatoes
So you really want to make your own backpacking stove? Start from first principles, then. Once your will is up to date, and you’ve paid the life insurance premium. If it’s just you and Bert your cat, and Bert is sticking by you, you might have a chance. Cats can usually pick winners, unlike most dogs. If your cat gives you a “thumbs up”, you know you have a pretty good chance. Since cats don’t have thumbs they have to really believe in you to pull this one off. So pay close attention to your cat.
Examine what a stove has to do. A stove has to hold fuel and burn it, making heat that goes somewhere useful. But what does a stove have to be made from? Do you really need to be a titanium-certified aerospace machinist to make one? Probably not. Sometimes it pays to experiment. Just for the sake of learning things.
Why can’t backpacking stoves be made from nontraditional materials? Like, say, potatoes? There’s a thought. Potatoes are cheap and plentiful.
Find a likely potato. To save time, buy a bag full of them at a supermarket. You could also grow your own, or walk around until you bumped into one, but generally buying a bag of them will be quicker.
Once you have a friendly-looking potato in your hand, turn it right-side up. Since you’re now in charge of your own destiny, you also get to decide which end is up. We’ll wait while you do it.
Done already? OK, then. Next make sure that the potato can stand on its own. This is an important part of any potato’s life, and the life of your project, so maybe now is a good time to pause and celebrate with a glass of wine. But not too much, and only after your potato is standing proudly erect. You can try sharing some wine with Bert if he’s that kind of cat.
(If you have a pet that isn’t a cat, it might be best to reconsider the whole premise here. Those who have, say, cockroaches or rhinoceroses as house pets may not be suitable for this enterprise. Dog owners should be out cleaning up after their pets.)
Now that you have an erect potato, cut a cup in its top side. It should be deep enough to hold an ounce of alcohol and then some. Planning prevents unpleasant overflow. For those who simply can’t stand potatoes, we can at this point say that it’s perfectly all right to try this with an apple, or perhaps a beet. Maybe even a rutabaga, if rutabaga mutilation is legal in your state. You are the expert here, so let those creative juices flow!
Time For Testing!
If this sounds too “scientific” or “technical”, or just “scary”, then think of it instead as “recess” or “playtime”. Ignore those double quotes around the spooky words you just read. After all, you’ve been working hard so far, and you need a little fun. Maybe even another glass of wine. Couldn’t hurt, could it? What could go wrong anyway? If you do have wine, then call it a day, and come back later, rested, refreshed, and raring to go, as sober as you can get by then.
Ready? Well, then, remember that we’re still in the experimental stages, where failure is as important as success, maybe even more so, so get out there and fire up your potato. Let’s see what happens.
Probably the best place to fire up a potato is away from anything that could unexpectedly burst into flames. Especially big scary flames. Houses come to mind. Expensive vehicles with large fuel tanks. Pets. Friends. Family. Be nice. Feed Bert a big tuna dinner, then park him on a windowsill where he can safely watch you and take notes between naps. Keep your buddy safe indoors. You never know when you might need an objective observer to unravel your experimental results. And you should always work outdoors.
A paved parking lot is a pretty good bet for your first try, in case your potato explodes with little or no warning. Not that it’s likely to, but then again, I don’t know you, or your potato. Maybe you’ve been responsible and cautious up to this point, taking small careful steps and wearing protective clothing. But you have had a couple of glasses of wine you know. Maybe that’s a little much. Even if you did sleep on it. Maybe not, but it can’t hurt to be careful.
Maybe you worried about your chosen vegetable. Maybe you doused your potato (or rutabaga) with some ether you had lying around, to ensure anesthesia. This should have been a big warning signal. Never, ever trust any chemical that is lying, and if possible don’t douse vegetables in lying, explosive chemicals just before you set them alight. Alcohol is bad enough. At least in your condition. You’re an adult, and you don’t want to ruin things for the rest of us adults. Some of us have good reputations.
Skip the afternoon hours, and the hours of darkness. It’s best to try this right after daybreak when no one will be watching. The neighbors will still be abed, with their small piggy eyes shut tight in a close room packed full of snores. They won’t see bright flames leaping up against a dark midnight sky.
Even if your neighbors stay up all night trying to keep an eye on you, they will have given up by dawn. So do this early, say about five a.m. or so, after those busy-bodies have gotten groggy and finally just slid down the insides of their windows and begun snoring on the floor. The idea is to catch them off guard. And have a potato that doesn’t explode. Or rutabaga, whichever.
It Should Work
And you’ll have reached an important stage in your evolution as a stove builder, the stage that tells you that potatoes can be used as backpacking stoves. Except for a few small problems. Maybe Bert can explain some of this if you need more help, but the basics are:
First, you’ll realize that potatoes are just too heavy. As are beets. And rutabagas. Hey, they’re full of water! Like 90 per cent! Whoa, there! What were you thinking? Sure they’ll dry out, but they’ll get all gross with mold and stuff first and you won’t want to touch them.
And since you’re an adult (now) you know that it isn’t all fun all the time any more. You have to clean up after yourself these days, so Mom won’t be touching the gross stuff, you will. Yuk. And then when vegetables do dry out they’ll be all gnarly and weird and stuff, and just make a lot of smoke and maybe catch on fire when you try to cook over them.
This is science. True science. It has been proven. This is how penicillin was invented, and vulcanized rubber, and pay telephones. Sure, sure, aside from penicillin there wasn’t much mold involved (which is a big plus in the notebooks of most inventors), but it was still science. Hard core. Big time. Top drawer. Top notch. First rate, A-Number-One. Until cell phones, maybe, but it’s the idea that counts as much as anything, in these early stages.
Other Fruits & Vegetables
Now that you’ve taken the leap into stove making with unconventional materials, you’re probably feeling a lot more comfortable. Those of you who haven’t been arrested or hospitalized, and that should be almost all of you.
Let’s take a look at some other materials beyond garden vegetables. Doing this will widen our comfort zone and ease us farther into the realm of do-it-yourselfishness, and take us farther from a dependence on industrial facilities run by possibly unreliable strangers in distant lands where the clocks show unusual hours and people are rumored to hang upside down from the earth’s surface by their feet.
Lint
Lint is probably out as a stove-making material. You get it wet and then what? Goes limp right away. Plus it doesn’t hold fuel, especially not liquids. And, yup, it burns. Darn it all to heck.
Paper
Paper is handy for a lot of things. For example, say you’re out backpacking somewhere, it’s just before breakfast, and you get this great idea for a novel. But being a true ultralighter, you didn’t bring a notebook. If your stove is made from paper you can just grab a pine needle from the forest floor, scratch yourself to draw blood, and then use the bloody pine needle to jot down your thoughts on the stove itself. Next thing you know, though, and you’ve lit the stove, which then goes up in smoke. BECAUSE IT’S MADE OF PAPER!
Whipped Cream
So that won’t work then. Or stoves made from rags, wood scraps or plastic. Or stoves made from ice or soft foods like whipped cream. Stoves made from foods other than potatoes or beets (including those made from rutabagas) will generally have the same disadvantages as the tuber stoves. True, some of them are semi-edible, but even if they worked as stoves they would persistently attract undesirable creatures who would forever be dropping in on you at awkward hours for a bite, sometimes of you.
Shiny Stuff
No, hard experience has pretty well proven these days that the best backpacking stoves are made from shiny stuff. We mean here not pretty stones with appealing gemlike fossils delicately embedded within, but the old tried and true metals: brass, aluminum, steel, and titanium.
Unluckily for you, I have no experience whatsoever in machining titanium and cannot pass on any helpful tips at all. Titanium is a very durable and wonderful metal with raw material costs ranging around $100 a pound. Its greatest failing is that no one makes soft drink cans from it.
Cans will be our starting point. Cans represent more than just raw material. Ask Bert. He knows, clever little fellow. Steel cans, aluminum cans. Cans. The fundamental idea is cans. There is even a famous design for backpacking stoves called the “Cat Stove”. Made from cans. From the beginning. From cat food cans, and said to be ever so efficient. See? You should talk to Bert more often.
If you have a can to start from you’ve already gotten someone else to do most of the hard work, the mining, smelting, milling, flat rolling and such. People don’t do that with titanium. They make airplanes from titanium, not cat food cans. Bert already knows this. You should too — it will save you a lot of frustration.
Steel
Steel, now, steel is the king of metals. Steel will do just about anything you want, it’s cheap and available all over, and fully understood. You won’t ever get up in the middle of the night to find that your steel stove has decided to go through a mid-life crisis, facing a dark mountain of doubt and weeping and moaning.
Steel doesn’t drool or throw tantrums either. It never needs psychotherapy, and it always shows up for work on time, right on the dot. Good old steel. What a pal.
Steel is heavy, though, and pretty hard to work as metals go, even starting with steel in can form. Most people don’t know this, but steel is only slightly heavier than titanium, or contrariwise, titanium is only a little lighter than steel. Titanium is like rustproof steel that has gone on a very brief slimming diet. Titanium though lighter by a little is not much lighter, it is prettier however and it costs a lot more. Like $100 a pound, as noted earlier. So screw it.
Once you get into stove building you’ll see cans all over. You’ll find yourself digging into trash bins looking for cans to use. Sometimes people walking by will flip you an occasional quarter, for encouragement. Always be polite and thank them. This is tax-free income. In fact, you can get thousands per year per donor without incurring a tax hit, so always encourage these people.
Aluminum Cans
The real king of the hill in the do-it-yourself stove world is the aluminum can. Cat food comes in these as well as in steel cans. Most aluminum can stoves start out as drink cans though. One of the early innovators was Scott Henderson, who designed the original Pepsi Can Stove, and published plans for all to use. At the time there was something about Pepsi Cola cans that apparently was a little different, and made them more useful, but now all cans seem to be the same. Any 12-ounce aluminum drink can will do.
You can accept this, and stick with Pepsi or Coke cans, or do your own research and find the perfect beer can for your stove. This is the other part of science that we didn’t tell you about earlier. It’s called “pure research”. They call it “pure” because it’s so much fun. As in Pure Fun, with capital letters and all. You can carry it on for years. There are so many kinds of beer out there that you’ll probably never complete your collection, but you can try.
The important thing though is to take notes. All scientists know that it’s not science if it isn’t repeatable, so take notes. Scientists take notes. You should take notes on the kinds of beer you drink, and then you can come back to exactly that same kind of beer later, to verify your earlier results with another round of experiments. The integrity of science demands that you do this at least three or four times before you form any definite conclusions. That keeps you honest and enhances the purity of your work. You can have friends join you too. Then you have both pure research and a party. Scientists call it “collaboration”.
If you don’t have friends then you can still have a lot of fun drinking alone by the window, especially if your cat will join you. If your cat doesn’t drink, he’ll probably at least let you share the windowsill if you don’t get loud or barf on him. Try to avoid the feet. Cats especially dislike humans barfing on their trim and sensitive delicately-furred feet.
During your research years be sure to save all your cans. They will become your raw materials. Don’t be afraid to fill the spare bedroom with them.
Aluminum cans then. Aluminum cans constitute the ideal raw material for making ultralight backpacking stoves. They are very light because aluminum is a low-mass metal, and because there just isn’t much material there. The cans have already been formed into cup-like shapes, which is a good starting point for a stove. Aluminum is strong and tough, and pretty hard, but the walls of the cans are so thin that you can cut the material with a scissors or a utility knife, which makes the metal easy to work.
Your Later Years
Once your doctor tells you that you’ve accumulated enough beer cans, and should switch your research away from substances containing alcohol, you can get started investigating the smaller cans.
Look for things like vegetable and fruit juices packaged in 5.5-ounce (163 ml) aluminum cans. You can make the same kinds of stoves from these as from 12-ounce beer cans, but scaled down. This work may be a bit harder if you’ve spent too many years in research among beer cans and no longer have quite the fine motor skills you once did.
You may even find that you’ve become a professional recycler, living out on the streets in the fresh clean air, and have given up ideas of backpacking altogether. If this happens, you’ll be glad that you learned how to accept donations from passing strangers early on.
Enjoy!