KittyCat Stove
Name of stove: KittyCat, a smaller version of the cat stove.
Type of stove: Double walled, unpressurized. Basically a cup with a cap on it.
URL of original instructions: See Roy Robinson’s Cat Food Can Alcohol Stove: http://bit.ly/LTxMAs (For general info on lightweight do-it-yourself stoves, see the Zenstoves links page at http://bit.ly/9fZe6O)
Description of difficulty: Hardly more than the cup stove.
Overview: This is a stove with a can over it. The stove itself can actually be of just about any design. The can over it forms an air jacket that serves to insulate the stove and warm incoming air, protect the stove from breezes, and can be used to restrict the amount of air available.
The version described here is about as simple as you can make it. The stove is a plain cup, and the outer sleeve is another can that just sits over it. The sleeve has vent holes in its sides and a burner hole cut into its bottom, which becomes the top of the stove. The cup sits inside this and just holds the fuel.
If you follow the original instructions and use a steel tuna can for the outer sleeve, your stove will end up both heavy and bulky, relatively speaking, though if you like the design you can slim it down by using smaller and lighter cans. That is what these plans describe here, and since this stove is smaller, I’ve renamed it and call it the KittyCat stove.
Think this name will improve my image, make me seem more fuzzy and cuddly, attractive to women? I.e. help me get chicks? Yeah, right, no.
The plus side of using the original cat stove design is that the inner and outer pieces become permanently attached (by friction from bent pieces of metal) as the stove is made, so you have only one piece to handle. The downside of this, if you think of it as that, is that the stove becomes a little harder to light, since you have to stick a match down into it.
With the version described here you fill the stove with fuel, light it, and set the outer sleeve over the burner. The two pieces are not physically bonded to each other. So this version is a lot easier to light, but you also have two separate pieces to keep track of.
With either version you can stuff the burner with fiberglass insulation to make a wick. A wick like this gives a stove a more regulated burn, and the flame tapers down gradually as the fuel runs out, but also ends up burning so low that it puts out almost no heat, and can still keep burning that way for many long minutes. Your choice.
Technical details:
Stove Height:1.25" (32 mm).
Stove Diameter:2" (50 mm).
Sleeve Height:1.5" (36 mm).
Sleeve Diameter:2.6" (65 mm).
Weight, total:0.30 ounce (8.5 g).
Volume:1 ounce (30 ml).
Composition:Aluminum can from Wal-Mart sandwich spread, or Spam sandwich spread, as with the Spamster stove, plus a 5.5 ounce juice can.
Materials list:
Empty 5.5 ounce (163 ml) aluminum juice can (for stove)
Empty can from Spam sandwich spread, or a similar can (for sleeve)
Electric or manual drill, with 1/16" (or 3/32"), and 1/4" bits
Ruler
Leather work gloves
Marking pen
Pushpin, heavy safety pin or heavy needle
Sandpaper (100 grit, or thereabouts)
Sheet of paper
Tape
Utility knife
Overview of construction process: First you’ll make a cup, and then an outer sleeve for it.
Step-by-step construction
1: Mark the can for the cup.
This cup is similar to the OCUP’s cup but smaller. See the photos there for guidance.
Put a line near the bottom of the can to show you where to cut.
Set the can down on a smooth surface like a kitchen counter top. Next to it, plunk down several magazines. Lay your marking pen on the top magazine, push the can over to it, and measure where the point of the pen meets the can. You’re looking for a point 1.25" (32 mm) up from the bottom of the can.
If the pen point is either too high or too low, shuffle different magazines until you get a stack that’s the right height. You may have to do some fine tuning with scrap sheets of cardboard from the back of a tablet of paper, or several thicknesses of paper – what you use doesn’t matter much. You can sandwich any loose sheets of paper in between two of the magazines. That will keep them in place.
Then hold down the pen down and turn the can through one or two revolutions until you have a clear, dark line of ink going around the can at a height of 1.25" (32 mm).
Using this height will give the stove a deep enough well for fuel.
2: Score the can.
Once you have a line drawn around the outside of the can, set aside the pen and put the utility knife in its place. Be sure the knife has a sharp, new blade in it. And it’s a good idea to wear work gloves for this step, especially leather gloves if you have them.
Lay the knife down flat on its side on top of your pile of magazines and put the blade’s point up to the can. Adjust the height until the point hits the line you’ve just drawn. Hold the knife down with one hand and rotate the can with the other hand, scoring the can. Push the blade against the can, but not hard enough to dent it.
Keep turning the can carefully for several revolutions. You want to make a deeper and deeper score line in the side of the can, and you want to keep the knife in the same groove on each pass. This is pretty hard to do perfectly, but get as close as you can. You are not trying to cut through the can, only to score it.
3: Break off the cup.
When you think you’ve cut most of the way through the side wall of the can you need to stress it. Use the back side of your knife’s blade (the dull side) or your thumb. Press hard enough to flex the side of the can a little without denting it, and move back and forth along the score line.
Stress a short section of the the can wall this way over and over again. What you’re doing here is trying to fatigue the metal of the can until it breaks apart. This will give you a cleaner result than if you cut through the can.
This part of the process is trial and error, so just keep at it until you find a scored part of the can’s wall that just lets go. You can go back to scoring the side again for awhile, to deepen the cut if this doesn’t seem to be working.
Once part of the scored line breaks through you can keep working along it, turning the can and breaking it apart along your scored line until the top part separates from the bottom part. Once you get the process started, it will be a give and take between stressing the metal and gently pulling the two halves of the can away from each other.
Work very gently. The two main things to keep in mind are not to damage the can and not to get cut. The can will separate when it’s ready.
When done with this first step you’ll have the bottom 1.25" (32 mm) of the can separated from the top.
4: Dull the cup’s sharp edges.
Now take up your sandpaper, hold the bottom (your new stove, the cup-like part) in one hand, the sandpaper in the other, and scuff the fresh edge with the sandpaper. You want to run the sandpaper in three different directions: flat across the cut edge, outside, but angled toward the inside of the stove, and inside, but angled toward the outside.
In other words, you want to cover all the angles, and remove every sharp edge there is. This is important, because this thin metal is just about as close as you can get to a free-range razor blade. It is deadly sharp. Please read that again if it didn’t sink in. IT IS SHARP!
5: Prepare the sleeve.
Remove the top of the other can (using the handy dandy built-in pull tab) remove the contents, wash and dry the can, and dull all the sharp edges where you removed the top.
6: Make a ventilation template.
First, remove the label from the can.
Take a full-sized sheet of paper (8.5" by 11") and cut off a strip along the long edge. It should be one inch wide (25 mm). The whole strip should measure 1" by 11" (25 by 279 mm).
Make several marks 0.25" (6 mm) in from the factory-cut edge and use a ruler to connect them into a line.
Using a small piece of tape (so you can easily remove it again in just a minute) stick one end of this paper strip to the side of the can.
Then wrap this strip of paper around the can, overlap the two ends, and mark the inner layer where the outer layer of the paper strip overlaps it. Take the paper off the can. Take the paper off the can.
Now you’ll have a strip of paper with a mark on it. Cut on the line. What you have left is a strip of paper equal in length to the can’s circumference. That’s what you want.
Then fold this strip of paper in half three times (the long way). Unfold it and mark the point where each crease intersects the line you drew along the length of the strip. You will have seven marks. These will mark seven of your eight ventilation holes. The eighth hole will go where the two ends of the paper strip meet when you tape it back onto the can.
7: Drill vent holes in the can.
Set the can top side (open end) down. Wrap the paper strip around other end of the can (with the marks on the outside) and tape the ends together, and to the can, with another small piece of tape. The even, factory-cut edge of the paper template should be at the bottom (toward what is normally the top of the can).
Use a pushpin to punch a hole through the can wall at each place where you have a mark on the template.
Then remove the paper and use a fine bit, about 1/16" or smaller, and drill a hole through the can wall at each hole. You’ll have eight holes.
When you’re done drilling these holes, enlarge them. Do this by redrilling them with a 1/4" bit. We’re doing it this way because the can wall is thin and a large bit requires lots of pressure to get started. We don’t want the can wall to crumple from the pressure of shoving the drill bit against it. A smaller bit bites better and makes a good pilot hole for the larger bit.
8: Cut the burner hole.
Put on your gloves. Use the utility knife, and put its point inside the central concave spot in the bottom of the can (the side that you’ve had up). Put the knife point right on the line where this central depression starts. Keep the knife point there with a medium amount of pressure and turn the can around and around. You want to score the aluminum until you can pop out the whole center part as one disk.
This process will take a while so be patient, and try to make things more efficient by keeping the knife point running in one track, like a phonograph needle in the record groove (for any of you old enough to remember vinyl records).
Go around and around and around, until...you’ve cut deeply enough that you can tap the bottom of the can and it breaks loose. Don’t be in a hurry. This will take like what seems forever. You may have to keep scoring the can for 50 or 100 revolutions. Going slowly is not only safer, but it will give you a better result. In fact, it’s the only way to get it done. Force will not work. Let things happen in their own time.
The bottom of the can will first break through in just one spot – the whole thing won’t suddenly pop out cleanly, but you can keep working at it until you’ve got it all removed.
Some tapping with the blunt end of the utility knife will help. Tap lightly and see if anything happens. If not, then keep scoring. Eventually you’ll get a section of the can’s bottom to break through where you’ve been scoring it. Wiggle it. It will take some wiggling until the metal fatigues and lets go. Work with it. Work your way around until the whole disk pops free. Watch those fingers, though. This is extremely sharp metal.
You will end up with a pretty clean cut that needs a minimum of dressing to make it smooth and safe.
9: Dull the sharp edges.
Now take up your sandpaper and scuff the fresh edges with it until they are smooth and safe to handle. Cover all the angles, and remove every sharp edge there is.
10: Burning in.
Both the inner and outer cans need to be fired before using them to cook with.
Choose a safe, fireproof area such as a fire grate at a local park, add a small amount of denatured alcohol fuel to the stove, and burn it. About a quarter ounce will do. Check it out afterward and repeat as many times as you need to until you don’t get any smoke or burning smells coming off the stove.
Don’t set the stove on a wood fire to burn it in or you will melt it (it’s pretty thin). Take your time. Relax. Keep it fun.
Keep a pot of water nearby in case you need to quench any flames, or the stove gets knocked over while it’s burning.
11: Done.
That’s about it. Remember, this is a simple version of the cat stove. You now have a stove consisting of a simple cup to burn alcohol in, and a sleeve to go over it.
To use, put down a sheet of aluminum foil (either from a roll or cut out of an oven liner) put fuel in the cup, set it on the foil, light it, and place the sleeve over it, burner hole up. Air will enter through the vent holes at the bottom of the sleeve, rise up between the stove and the sleeve, and enter the stove. A lazy, steady flame will rise up through the burner hole. A pot stand (described later) will serve to support your cooking pot over this stove.
If the flame is too aggressive, you can cut it down by covering every other vent hole, or if you like a stove that burns faster and hotter, you can drill more ventilation holes.
From top to bottom, above:
(1) Assembled stove viewed from top and bottom.
(2) Bottom view, showing fuel cup inside windscreen.
(3) Two cutaway views of the two cups with the stove sitting upright.