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Where’s The Esbit?
Lots of people use fuel tabs. They’re not all Esbit but that’s what people call them. I have to give it to them on the rock simple scale. Nothing simpler for outertainment than just sitting there and pounding rocks together. Good enough for some but not for me. Call me crazy.
Makes my brain hurt just thinking about Esbit. I mean what could be better than a pocket full of sugar cubes and you light one whenever you need some heat? Some day somebody’s going to get it right but I haven’t quite seen it yet.
Simplest stove you can think of — get a length of steel ribbon like they use to bundle together a load of two-by-fours or some other kind of lumber at the lumberyard. Or maybe you can find some at a construction site.
Say your pot is six inches across. Take a 19-inch piece of the steel band, measure seven inches in from each end and bend it towards you into a right angle bend, then measure two inches in from each end and do the same.
Now you have a square five inches on a side open on the front side (a one-inch gap). Your pot should sit right down on it and at each corner there’ll be a little gap where the square corner peeks out from under the round pot.
Cut a piece of sheet aluminum out of an oven liner and put that down on the ground then put the steel band on that. Light an Esbit tablet and put that in the center then put your pot on top, now you have a stove and a pot support and a reflector all in one. Just protect the stove from wind and chill with a wind screen and you’re set.
I heard about this. The Esbit people say that you need the pot down low to the flame, and this is the simplest setup I’ve ever heard of.
I tried some fooling around at home with fuel tablets but they didn’t do too well for me, even sheltered from the elements. One tablet sort of almost brought 16 ounces of water to a boil and two tablets together didn’t do any better, just burned faster.
Here’s why I left it there: number one it didn’t get the water hot enough, number two I got a thick gummy coating on the bottom of my pot that took about two hours to scrape off, and number three, these tablets cost about 50 cents each. I assumed one would be enough and for me it wasn’t, nor were two.
If alcohol is 20 dollars a gallon and you use an ounce for each meal (which is a lot), and you cook two meals a day, then you’re going to spend about 30 cents a day for fuel versus two dollars a day for Esbit, assuming you use one tablet to cook and one to make a hot drink with, every meal, and you can get it to work better than I did. Some people do.
Anyway, that’s how I see it. That’s why we’re not taking up fuel tablets here too much.