paul standley
14-01-2011, 12:01 AM
If you know your DIY alcohol stoves you'll know the cat stove or 'super cat' style.
I've been playing around with the cat stove concept a bit lately and today I made a hybrid wick and cat stove I've called the Cat's Wicksers".
I used my old cat stove (made out of a steel pudding desert tin not alumium) so very robust. It's 65mm diameter.
Basically, I built a wick using a 1 inch wide carbon woven mesh strip wound around a thin hollow brass ferrule (carbon wick doesn't burn) and sat this wick/heat transfer arrangement in the middle of the cat stove and used the stove with a pot stand and not by placing the pot directly on top of the cat stove as would normally be the case.
The result is what looks to be a pretty efficient and hot running meths burner that appears to work using 'gassification' a bit like a wood gassification stove by drawing in air into the burn zone and mixing it with the volotile vapour to produce a decent flame.
Don't have any fuel usage stats yet but looks like it will be fuel efficient, last burn I did boiled 20 oz (1 pint) of water in my caddy in 5.5 minutes with around 30ml fuel (but I didn't measure it so i'm guessing) in the workshop.
Early days... I'll play some more and do a decent video in the next week or so but for now, have a look at the rough video snippets here and see what you think...
Paul.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2bijtaxvI&feature=youtube_gdata
I've been playing around with the cat stove concept a bit lately and today I made a hybrid wick and cat stove I've called the Cat's Wicksers".
I used my old cat stove (made out of a steel pudding desert tin not alumium) so very robust. It's 65mm diameter.
Basically, I built a wick using a 1 inch wide carbon woven mesh strip wound around a thin hollow brass ferrule (carbon wick doesn't burn) and sat this wick/heat transfer arrangement in the middle of the cat stove and used the stove with a pot stand and not by placing the pot directly on top of the cat stove as would normally be the case.
The result is what looks to be a pretty efficient and hot running meths burner that appears to work using 'gassification' a bit like a wood gassification stove by drawing in air into the burn zone and mixing it with the volotile vapour to produce a decent flame.
Don't have any fuel usage stats yet but looks like it will be fuel efficient, last burn I did boiled 20 oz (1 pint) of water in my caddy in 5.5 minutes with around 30ml fuel (but I didn't measure it so i'm guessing) in the workshop.
Early days... I'll play some more and do a decent video in the next week or so but for now, have a look at the rough video snippets here and see what you think...
Paul.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2bijtaxvI&feature=youtube_gdata