The Brave Little Stove

I heard about do-it-yourself soda pop can stoves a few years back and after reading in a few places that thru-hikers of the Appalachian Trail used them, I felt validated to follow suit. I gathered a few soda pop cans kept putting off the construction. I am not the most crafty person in the world with little patience to make sure everything is perfect, but I definitely did not want to spend between $40-$200 for a piece of gear I could make myself for less than a dollar that would work just as well for my purposes. Fortunately for me, since I kept putting off making the soda pop can stove, I came across a much simpler design using a cat food can. I wasn't sure if it would work as well as the popular soda pop can stoves I had heard so much about, but as I read The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide by Andrew Skurka, a professional thru-hiker, I found that he uses the cat food stove for all of his hikes. He even provides instructions on how to make one on his website here. I will also show how I made my stove, albeit a lot less professionally.

So I bought the off-brand cat food can and gave the food to my sister's cat. Then I cleaned the can and borrowed a hole-puncher from my mom. Then came the hard part. I had to punch two rows of holes at the top of the can. The holes had to be equally spaced with the bottom row of holes placed directly below the spaces between the holes of the top row. This was quite difficult for me and my first attempt looked like this:

After this was completed I rushed to our local hardware store to get the fuel. This type of stove runs on denatured alcohol which can be found in most hardware stores or paint stores, as well as in some outdoor stores. Denatured alcohol is cheap and I have read that increasingly, outfitters near the AT sell it by the ounce since it normally comes in large metal containers which would be too heavy to carry on the Trail. I brought the can home and poured some in the stove, below the holes. When I lit the fuel with a match I didn't know that it had lit at first. When I put my hand near it though, I could feel the heat. The flame is nearly invisible, especially in broad daylight. I placed a pot of water on top of the stove and watched the water carefully for several minutes until it finally began to boil. It worked!

I didn't touch it again until a couple of days before our hike of our Waterloo-Pinckney Trail. I bought another cat food can and with the help of my wife made sure the holes were pretty spot on where they were supposed to be. So now our stove looks like this:

I also had to make a windscreen because any kind of wind flow can greatly decrease the effectiveness of the stove. The windscreen was also simple to create, following Skurka's instructions here. I borrowed some aluminum foil from my sister and folded it in half lengthways. Then I simply folded all the edges so they were double thick. I then attached binder clips on the bottom to allow it to stand up more and to attach the two ends together when wrapped around the stove.

We didn't get a chance to actually cook a meal with the stove until our trip. We brought oatmeal, instant noodles, macaroni and cheese, and an onion soup mix. Our first meal was the instant noodles and we had a picnic table to set up the stove on. All of the shelters of the small section of the AT that I had hiked before had a picnic table in front, but the shelter itself could also work as a level ground. The third night out on our hiking trip we had no picnic table and had to cook on the ground. This was easy enough. Our 1.3 L pot does sit a bit precariously on our stove, but as long as we are careful all should be well.

We brought denatured alcohol in a small plastic water bottle, clearly marked so as not to confuse it with drinking water since the liquid is clear. After pouring it in the stove, lighting it, and placing the windscreen and pot in place we left it to do its work on the noodles while we set up camp. After a few minutes we noticed the pot smoking and rushed over to see what was happening. The fire was burning the plastic that cover the ends of the handles I had collapsed onto the sides of the stove. So we pulled the windscreen apart a bit and left the handles extended whenever we cooked for the rest of the trip. I think we just need to make the windscreen bigger so we can pull the handles a little bit away from the stove while keeping the windscreen totally surrounding the stove.

The tricky part about using an alcohol stove is that there is no way to put out the fire so we just let the fuel burn itself out. Hopefully we will learn quick how much alcohol we need for the amount of food we are cooking at any given time so as not to waste as much. We will never want to carry any more fuel than we need to get us to the next resupply point.      

The stove works very well and is extremely lightweight. It will be really nice to have hot meals, especially when it will be so cold the first several weeks of our AT thru-hike. For awhile I contemplated going stoveless as some do on their thru-hikes, but I think it will enable us to have a few more options regarding nutritional intake for our wearied bodies.