[Stoves] VERY small cooking: How to do it.

[Steve Roggenkamp]

Your posting for very small cooking is my primary interest in this 
technology.

I have been using alcohol stoves made from pop cans for several years 
when backpacking.  The particular stove I use is Don Johnston's Photon 
Stove: 
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/photonstove/stove/HighPerfAlcoholStove.html.  
I normally just use this stove to head about a pint of water to 
reconstitute dehydrated food, rather than maintaining the food at a high 
temperature for an extended period of time.

They are extremely light, 74 grams for the stove, pot support and 
windscreen, and efficient.  It takes about 25 ml of denatured alcohol to 
heat a 1/2 liter of water to boiling in less than 4 minutes.  It all 
fits inside of a 1 liter MSR cook pot.  I have used it at altitudes of 
up to 9200 feet without any problems as well as temperatures as low as 5 
degrees F, although I needed to revise the lighting techniques to 
compensate for the low volatility of alcohol at those temperatures.

I have also used the commercially available Heet (yellow bottle of 
methanol) with about the same performance.  One bottle of Heet will 
provide about 10 burns (less in winter).  It is best used to heat water 
as it's pretty much all or nothing.  The above web page has plans for 
simmering rings, but I have not tried them, yet.

It takes me about twenty minutes to construct the stoves starting from 
two pop cans.  I have used these stoves as an activity for my son's Boy 
Scout troop; some of the boys have used them while backpacking.  My 
current stove is almost four years old with many meals to its credit.

Having posted all of this, my current interest in the stoves mailing 
list is to build a backpacking stove that will burn bio materials 
obtained as I hike, such as small dry sticks, grasses, etc.  This would 
eliminate the need to carry heavy fuel and perhaps further lighten the 
load as well, depending on how light the stove could be made.

Currently most of my experiments revolve around using commonly available 
tin cans from the supermarket, they're cheap and easily available.  The 
biggest problem I seem to encounter is the lack of draft, so my stoves 
do not generate sufficient turbulence to insure good mixing of the air 
and wood gas fuel, resulting in flames that are too rich and incomplete 
combustion.  This leads to the undesirable coating on the bottom of pots.

I'm interested in the Wood Gas Camp Stove, but I'm trying to find a 
solution that does not include batteries.

Steve