Alcohol Stoves

[Suz]

Anyone here make their own alcohol stoves?

A friend has one of these from Trangia: http://www.trangia.se/ complete with the pots and all. What I admired about it was how quiet it was.

What do you think?

Make or buy?

Suz

[EEL]

No opinion, but this might give you some info to mull over.

http://art.simon.tripod.com/Stoves/

Ed Lawson

[Michael_Crouse]

You can find instructions for these all over the web, www.backpacking.net is a great place to start. A search for cat stove (cat food can) should turn up lots of matches and instructions. I would say make your own, if you don't like it you haven't invest much $.

[Brian Nystrom]

They're simple, quiet and relatively safer (no pressure, fuel is less toxic), but they have significant downsides:

- They're MUCH slower to heat due the the low burning temperature of alcohol (11 minutes per liter vs 3-3.5 minutes for other fuels).

- They require more fuel, as alcohol produces less heat for a given quantity than other fuels. That means more weight and volume to carry.

- They're nearly useless in really cold weather, unless you use the pre-heater.

Trangia's FAQ addresses these and many other issue, so it's worth reading before buying one of their stoves.

[JohnHuth]

Dang, Ed, you beat me to it! Yes, that's probably the best website.

FWIW, the Etowah is probably the most popular among Appalachian Trail thru-hikers. In one week in Maine, I counted about 7 of these in use.

It's cheap and gets hot pretty fast, It also has some kind of hobo-appeal to it.

[EEL]

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>FWIW, the Etowah is probably the most popular among

>Appalachian Trail thru-hikers.

I think it would be enlightening to find out from the thru-hikers in Maine what equipment they started with as opposed to what equipment they ended with and why.

In theory, I think I would prefer a gas cartridge stove for kayaking due to ability to haul stuff easily and performance for short trips. For a minimalist stove for emergencies more or less, I think the heat tab stoves make sense as the fuel could be used to start fires and the whole package is small and easily stored. Not that I think making fires is all that useful, but I'm odd. As evidence, I still use a Svea 123.

Ed Lawson

[bob budd]

Not sure you can yet beat the SVEA stove for volume and weight efficiency. Consider that you need a smaller volume/weight of fuel as well for the same period of time due to the heat efficiency of the white gas. When my brother did the three North-South trails in the US in three consecutive years he used a SVEA stove.

[JohnHuth]

The two biggies were the Etowah and MSR pocket rocket.

The Etowah is cheap and lightweight. The aluminum screen is very malleable, so you can configure it in different wind/weather conditions. It's also pretty rugged.

A number of the Etowah "converts" said they started out with heavier, white gas stoves, but they were too heavy and tended to fail more often. A lot of them found it easier to resupply methanol at the gaps in the trail than either white gas or iso-pro.

The MSR pocket rocket crowd seemed to have used these from the git-go. They also seemed more organized in terms of their supply system (ie. having dedicated folks who would send them gear to the nearest post-office).