I went for a couple of nights wild camping last week and took my charcoal stove, after making a few more adjustments. I swapped back to the original stove can with a big opening, so that it could be used as a wood burner as well if necessary. I then put a second grate in it just above the door level, on which to put the layer of charcoal, and, at the last minute, cut an inch or so off the top of the stove can. All of this meant I had a neat little wood-burning hobo stove, or that same wood could be used to light charcoal on the level above for a cleaner longer burn with less hassle, and the kettle, suspended on its cradle from the upper “chimney can” would be closer to the heat source in either case. There was a risk that this shortening of the whole would reduce the updraught through it, but I thought it would be a better net result.
There are a couple of disappointments: first of all, it dawned on me that I’d been thinking of charcoal as one of those fuels that should be easily available during hiking, which is true, but usually in 4 or 5 kg bags, a lot more than you’d want to buy when hiking; secondly, my estimates of how much I’d use were rather optimistic. The latter was at least partly because I boiled more water than expected, however, and I’m not sure how it would compare, weight for weight, with gas or alcohol. Unfortunately, my fuel arrangements were unauthodox in past solo camping trips, so I’d have to buy another type of stove to make a decent comparison.
I’m not going to switch back to a Coleman F1 or dig out the trangia just yet though. An ultralite gas stove might be more efficient, quicker and cleaner in use, but I have subjective reasons why I’d rather stick to wood and charcoal. I go out wild camping to get closer to nature and the “simple” life (in some ways more complicated): turning on a gas knob and boiling water in 4 minutes with a mechanical roar doesn’t compare well with the gentle crackle of wood, even if I have to work harder and wait longer. A real fire is almost a living companion for the time it’s burning. Where it’s safe and responsible to do so I’d rather have a little open wood fire between stones than a stove of any kind.
Then there’s the ecological differences. I don’t know, to be completely honest, just how bad butane and propane are to produce, put in metal cans and transport to the shop, or how difficult the cans are to recycle, I just know that it’s bound to be a lot worse for the planet than the renewable resources of local twigs or commercially produced charcoal. Again, this is a very subjective, emotional concern, since the overall amount of butane I would burn in the next 10 years would be trivial compared to my car’s petrol consumption next week! Still, I don’t like burning gas at camp, and if I could be bothered to run my car on charcoal I would.
What I need to do is experiment more. It’s possible that the second design of stove with large holes all round the base was better (although I’d not like to lose the dual-fuel ability of the stoking hole for putting wood in. It might be worth going back to charcoal briquettes to get a longer, steadier burn, or mix that with the natural charcoal. It’s early days. My experiments have been rather approximate. I think I took about 250 g of natural charcoal, and I burned it in about 5 sessions, but sometimes I got two “kettlefuls” (about 250 ml) boiled, or the second one hot enough for coffee, other times just one. I was in the woods, not a laboratory. Sometimes the stove seemed to work extremely well, as in the video below; other times I struggled to get the wood to light, or the charcoal to light from the wood. As a wood-burning stove it was just as hit-and-miss, and maybe this was more due to the dryness of the twigs I used on different occasions. It was also very clearly affected by the wind, being helped by a steady breeze into the door, without which I resorted to blowing in it. It may be worth trying to increase the air input holes, although there are quite a number around the base. I wonder about lifing the stove up further on legs and putting holes in what is now the base and ash collection pit, although this translates in effect to making the wood grate higher up in the stove. I also wonder if the inch I removed from the stove did reduce the draught, and whether to add that height to the top (also acting as extra insulation for the top of the kettle).
One particular issue was the amount of charcoal dust among the pieces, which of course I ended up with in the bottom of the bag. If this were eliminated, the same weight would have done me a hot breakfast on the third morning, but as powder it’s very hard to use, mainly because it falls through the grate to mix with the priming wood, or forms a blanket all the way across the charcoal grate, choking off the air. I plan another trip before long, and in the meantime will do some slightly more scientific testing in the back garden.
I made a few alterations to my “pocket charcoal chimney”, and also tried it with natural charcoal instead of briquettes.
I haven’t really described the making of the stove, not that it’s very different from a million others. I guess it might be useful to give a complete how-to sometime, but I’d rather tweak a bit more yet to get it better.
Mk II stove with wire mesh grate
New Stove Can
The bottom can is new, without a fuel door, but with big holes down below the level of the grate instead. I’ve given both a few test runs, and this seems a better option for my current intentions – if I can get the charcoal stove efficient enough I’ll avoid burning twigs, simply for the reduced smoke, tar and messing about. The fact that you have to feed a stove like this little twigs and stuff constantly means you’re constantly breathing in the smoke, whereas a normal camp fire you’ll only tend now and then. There is the option of packing it with more wood in one go, but that makes a lot of smoke, soot and mess on the kettle, burns like a torch for a few minutes and then you’re back to square one. This is the beauty of charcoal. I’ve gone right off sitting around stinking of woodsmoke.
The downside of having holes all the way round is that when there’s a wind blowing, you can’t point it into the wind to help fan the fire, but if there aren’t holes all the way round it will reduce the air, which is critical when it’s a still day. The optimum might be to have a door that can be closed on 2/3 or so of the air intake holes to force it with the wind. I suppose just wrapping foil round some of them would be an option too. I find it useful to put the whole stove on a layer of aluminium foil, and that can be brought up round the base as a windshield. It also reflects heat to improve efficiency and protect the ground from scorching.
Wider Chimney
I got the feeling that when I added the second can on top as a chimney, the fire was a little choked with the kettle in (which helps to boil the water in it!) due to the small area between kettle and chimney sides. The same thing happens when the kettle is located in the lower can rather than sitting on top of it on wires. For getting the most heat out of dying embers, this latter position is probably fine, because there’s less draught required, but when burning hot, the gap is rather small – only about 2.5 mm. The second can is important because it extends the height, creates more updraught and keeps the heat next to the kettle, but it has another disadvantage: it doesn’t pack up with the rest, being the same diameter as the stove can. These are your everyday baked-beans size holding about 420 g. They’re 7.5 cm diameter and 10.5 cm high.
So I’ve tried using a sweetcorn tin for the upper section – these are about 8.5 x 8.5 cm. – and fitted it on top of the other simply by cutting a hole a little smaller than the bean tin and bending it down evenly all around so that it locates on the top lip. The idea is that when the stove is on full blast and needs more draught up the chimney, you support the kettle only inside this upper, wider, can. [Edit: Now I've found that real charcoal doesn't burn with flames leaping up the chimney, I'm not sure if this is better or not. Further testing required.]
Improved Kettle Support
You could drill or punch holes in the sides of this upper can, and put thick wire through to support the kettle (people often use spare tent pegs), but I came up with a new holder made of two strips of steel cut from a larger can and wired together with thin wire where they cross. This is probably a little bit lighter than the wires, and more easily adjustable for fit. It can be bent to length and hung over the top of the can. Here it is inside the sweetcorn can:
I haven’t perfected it yet, and I’m not sure whether to continue using the pegs through holes in the stove at the lower level or work something else out. It might be good to get the hangar piece so that it works in both cans and just needs lifting from one to another. I’ve put too many bends in this one as I botched it together.
Better Grate
This wire-mesh grate is better than the old computer fan grill, particularly to keep smaller particles of charcoal from dropping through. Once I’ve decided how high to have it I’ll cut the legs to size (which are just parts of the mesh bent down and under), and then it’ll stow upside-down to allow more room for the kettle.
Kettle on its hanger inside sweetcorn tin
That’s about it apart from a slightly wider base (stray embers catcher and another layer of protection for the ground), but I’m not sure if that’ll survive later hacks. Again, it’s the problem of storing this. At the moment the sweetcorn size of tin, 8.5 cm, fits nicely inside my water filter. This wider one has to be stowed separately.
Natural Charcoal (Bar-be-quick Lumpwood)
This experiment turned out much better than expected. I thought it might be difficult to start, but it seemed pretty much the same as briquettes. It burned without the smell, without the smoke, and with hardly any flame, just red-hot coals. I think there was maybe a slight smoky smell right up close. The main advantage of briquettes for barbequeing is they often give a longer slower burn: for the camping stove this was a disadvantage. The lumpwood continued a fair old time too, but was a quicker, hotter burn, as far as I can judge without a suitable thermometer.
Hot or Not?
My testing at this stage is mostly subjective and proof-of-concept. I’ll get to boil times later. I noticed there’s a standard developed for this kind of thing – 2 cups – so I’ve since doubled up the water from my first experiment. [Edit - just realised this is still only about 440 ml, which is a bit less than 2 cups, 473 ml.]
I’m still using about the same slug of fuel by weight as a briquette, and even trying to reduce it. I used about 40-45 g. of charcoal this time, broken up into pieces about 2-3 cm across, plus the powder and intermediate stuff that comes from tapping charcoal with a hammer. I still expect that smaller pieces of a more even size might give better results.
The fuel of artists
My water took a fairly long time to get hot enough to use, somewhere in the region of 15 minutes, and didn’t reach a rolling boil. Personally, I’m happy with that. I’m not “fast and light”, just light. I don’t mind waiting a wee bit for a nice cuppa if the stove works well, doesn’t need too much tending, is clean enough (by which I mean mainly the air quality and lack of soot on pans), reasonably safe, cheap and fairly lightweight. I haven’t found out yet what weight of propane and butane it takes to boil 2 cups of water, and that’s my target, but
a) charcoal will always be slower, probably, and
b) it won’t explode, probably. (Powders, however, can do so.)
[Edit: There's a great comparison of stove fuels at Zen Backpacking, and charcoal isn't too shabby on the old BTUs, about 14000 BTU per pound weight compared to about 19000 for propane. Methanol comes in at under 8000. There's a lot of information on that page for estimating the weight of fuel and associated equipment required for camping trips, based on boiling a US pint of water a day, 16 oz, 2 cups, 473.18 ml - ish? Charcoal only gets a passing mention again, which I'm increasingly puzzled about. From the graph, I estimate my rough target as 50 g of fuel per "meal" or per "day", i.e. to boil 2 cups. Pimps. Lemon squeezy.]
I personally don’t require a rolling boil at camp. Near boiling takes a fraction of the calories and is great for most beverages and pouring over my super-noodles or whatever. For my tea and coffee I’d add powdered milk, so it’ll be too hot if it’s boiling. There are a lot of videos on youtube of stove tests, where the object is to time super-accurately 2 cups of water reaching that magical rolling boil, but not often much science behind it – in particular, often the starting temperature is not taken, which makes a vast difference. Boiling some water straight out of a glacial stream is going to take a lot more fuel than from room temperature. But it’s those last couple of degrees to boiling that take vast amounts of fuel. Changing state is energy expensive.
Probably the only negative side to this test was that the lump charcoal showered a fair amount of sparks, something I didn’t notice at all with the briquettes. These were tiny little points of light pinging as the charcoal caught light, and they didn’t fly very far, but it’s a reason to keep the stove further from a nylon tent or other flamable material than with the briquettes. In the average English summer, I don’t expect those little sparks would set light to anything, but it’s something to be aware of if it’s been particularly dry. I’ve only tested it once, so it could be a mere fluke and not happen again, or it could be a regular feature.
One other big difference is the ash – there’s very little of it with proper charcoal, just white wood ash as you’d expect. The briquettes produced a big heap of motly ash, and I don’t know if it’s common, but I found a fair amount of little pebbles in mine. That’s a trick charcoal men have been criticised for since the 17th Century, hiding stones among their wares. It’s not easy to get away with it now, unless you pulverize it, mix it with all sorts of other things, and then shape it into briquettes.
Natural charcoal is actually very pleasant to deal with. The lumps just look like black pieces of wood, of course, complete with grain. It’s mucky stuff to handle, but, as the saying goes, “good clean muck”. And if you’re ever bored at camp, you can draw something with it.
I’m getting into the upcycling lark. Here’s how I made myself a camping water filter from a Brita (TM) filter cartridge and a pop bottle.
Now, it’s not as high-tech as the backpacking filters where you pump the water through a ceramic element, but it’s got some serious advantages, not least that it’s a fraction of the weight and costs virtually nothing. It weighs about 50 g (1 3/4 oz), and could be a little less. I made it a generous size to allow nearly a litre of water to filter unattended, and put some rather overkill heavy-duty cord on it. Many of the pump varieties are getting on for 10 times that weight, they’re expensive, clog up and require maintenance or more expense replacing the filter elements, and you have to pump a handle to force water at high pressure, sometimes hundreds of times per litre.
My filter uses gravity while I’m doing something else, and is pretty quick. I’ve slowed it down with a thin layer of cotton wool pad to allow the active ingredients to work more effectively. It doesn’t remove all the stuff the ceramic ones would, but has its uses. For instance, you might boil your water to sterilise it, or use drops or tablets, but sometimes it looks unappetising, and chemical treatments are less reliable if the water is cloudy or has other physical crud in it, so a simple gravity filter is a good idea. However, this does a lot more, according to the Brita site. It removes a good portion of chemical contaminants that might be there, and should go some way toward removing micro-organisms and inhibiting their growth, at least.
If you’re out on the trail on a hot day and run out of drinking water, and there’s a clear stream to drink from, you could be fooled into thinking it’s good quality drinking water, when there happens to be contamination from agricultural run-off or biological decay (like a dead animal upstream). Boiling uses a lot of time and fuel and leaves you with warm water to drink; using drops or tablets to kill the bugs works, but if you use them all the time for several litres a day, the weight becomes significant to the ultralight backpacker, and they’re adding more chemicals and sometimes alter the taste. You can use UV sterilisers, but then there’s the battery to carry, and the bulbs only last so long before they have to be replaced too. With a lightweight, gravity-fed filter, you can refill your water bottle from the stream and have a cold drink by the time you’ve rested a moment and drunk in the view, and enjoy natural stream water but with reduced risk of an upset stomach if you elect to skip the sterilisation chemicals or use less of them.
Here’s how I did it. The main parts are a pop bottle (I used a 1.5 litre one), cut off at whatever size is convenient, and the Brita filter cartridge:
The bottom of the filter cartridge has two circular areas of holes to keep the filter material from coming through:
I cut round one with a scalpel and glued it inside the neck of the bottle, like so:
This plastic mesh circle will perform two functions, as a first filter, straining out any particles bigger than about half a millimetre, and to keep the filter medium in place. A portion of Brita filter material will be held between it and a similar mesh fitted in the “bottle top” (now the bottom as the whole thing is upside down), here:
At first I used a solvent-free glue that professed to glue most types of plastic, but it was still slightly tacky after about 3 days and the water actually dissolved it (the photo shows it going white and soft), so I did it again with a solvent-based one, which seems to work fine and dried in minutes.
Next, I took the top off one of those water bottles that has a drinking valve. It looks a bit different because I cut off the white plastic outer tube. As it happens, I didn’t need to do this once I altered the way the filter attaches to the collecting bottle: my first idea was to slot this inner valve into the collecting bottle with a connector, and it only fitted the connector at this smaller diameter. I’ll probably replace it with a new one sometime, so water can be held in the filter reservoir by closing it.
An ordinary bottle top would have done, but not as well – it would pour badly – especially as I wanted it to pour straight into a similar bottle below.
The second mesh circle was cut and gradually reduced in diameter until it fit snugly into the inside, and I cut a ring of foam plastic to act as a seal:
A perfect seal isn’t really necessary, as any water leaking at this point has already been through the filter – it would only be a tiny gap probably smaller than the mesh itself. The mesh is there to stop the filter material washing through into your bottle, that’s all (although it is completely non-toxic anyway).
Actually, the plastic on the inside of the top was moulded with a flange to locate on the inside of the bottle neck, and three prongs of plastic extended a little further below this – why, I have no idea. In order to seat the mesh it was necessary to cut all that off flush, which was a little trouble. An alternative, probably easier in the long run, would be to use an ordinary top, cut a moderately sized hole in it and control the outpouring by inserting a tube of some sort, glued in place. However, in this version there remains a second volume below the mesh, which I thought might prove useful in some way. To get to it I would just need to pull out the O-ring and mesh.
The main filter chamber is reached, to replace the contents, simply by unscrewing the whole top in one. I expect to change the filter material regularly. I may pack a small amount to take on a camping trip, just in case, and it would be best to change it in between trips. Here’s what the filter looks like when you’ve hacked it:
And here’s the carbon and ceramic mixture being loaded into the filter:
Brita filter replacement cartridges are costly enough not to just hack a brand new one for the contents and plastic mesh circles, although you can if you want. All I did was replace the cartridge we use in the kitchen a week or so early, so I know that it’s got some life left in it. There is, of course, a great deal more material in one than you need in this scaled down version, so you can store the rest and replace it however often you like.
Ready to roll:
So here’s how Mk I was meant to work: my drinking bottle, a 1 litre plastic pop bottle, would be held somewhere convenient, between stones or in the side pocket of my pack, and something would hold the filter above it. I toyed with different ideas and poked about in my collection of junk and found this, part of the transit clips from a washing machine (sorry about the focus):
Part of it was just the right shape to act as the connector, if I cut a slot in it. It was light, strong and easily modifiable into a clip that would squeeze into the drinking bottle while holding the filter tight, like so:
You can see the slot in the bottom that I cut, which perfectly located between the gaps in the screw thread.
All that was required was a little support – here using part of my stove setup:
This was useable, but would require the drinking bottle to be held pretty steady to support the heavier top when first adding water. In the field this could be awkward and lead to spillage. So Mk II hangs by a cord threaded through the top, from a tree branch, walking pole, stick in the ground or the tent porch, with the drinking bottle hanging below. The best way to do this, I reckon, is to permanently attach another bottle top, with its end cut off to form a cylinder, by cord or wire to the filter. I used wire at first, which was easier to get the right length, but it snapped from being bent up when packed away, so I replaced it with some strong cotton, which was more fiddly to get right. A loop goes round the neck somewhere that won’t slip off (a good place is just behind the little ring of plastic that remains after first opening your pop, which is integral with the top until you break the connections), and then three cords are attached to that, spaced round the neck (I’m figuring that three is better than four), and tied to little holes melted through the bottle-top-with-no-top (these parts need naming!) – you’ll see in the video that follows how it ends up.
An alternative would be to hang it with some other kind of connector. I almost made it that way using two of those bits of white plastic, fitting them round the bottle necks and bolting them together, but really, cord is simpler and lighter. In the video, even though it’s quite windy and the empty bottle is swinging, it catches all the water. You could make the cord shorter, but you need to be able to move it to one side to remove the filter end to refresh the contents.
Now all I need to do when I want to filter water in the wild is take the normal top off my bottle, screw it onto the filter and hang it up. The only other thing needed is some sort of container to collect the water from the source, which can be a billy can or plastic bag.
Incidentally, I find that those plastic bags that are moderately thick with a reinforced top and press closure particularly good for getting water from even the smallest trickle of a stream. Many types of food come in them.
I deliberately made the filter chamber rather small as I’m on an ultra-lightweight kick this year. Different shaped bottles (like my drinking bottle shown here) have longer necks, tapering more gradually. Using one of those would give a bigger volume for the filter material and make the water pass more of it vertically.
While the Brita material itself is very light indeed, it naturally stays wet for some time in use, so you carry proportionally more water for more material in the chamber. This is at the cost of its functioning, of course – the more material the water passes through the better – but it also speeds up flow. If anything, the flow was rather “too fast” (in my guestimation), so I have since replaced the o-ring with a disc of cotton wool (cut from one of those make-up removers, but using only part of the thickness). The filter isn’t just stopping physical particles, it’s having various chemical effects on the water molecules, and if it isn’t in contact with them very long that effect is reduced. Just physically slowing it down should help remove more nasties for the same amount of material.
I was pretty chuffed with this project, but the best was yet to come, when I found purely by accident that my new lightweight stove-and-kettle combo fits right inside the filter reservoir. The whole thing packs together and goes in a rucksack pocket.
Yeehar! I think I’ve finally cracked it! The weeks of thinking and design and testing and buying and taking back to the shop and nearly setting the house on fire are finally over! Not only that, I think I may have just broken new ground in the hotly-contested (ouch, sorry) field of backpacker’s lightweight camping stove. Probably not, but my first hour or so googling and youtubing didn’t turn up anyone else doing what I just did this afternoon. One or two doing it badly, of course, and one very nice man making a tediously long pig’s ear of it, but…
It’s a good job I had a success today, because I was getting pissed off with the whole affair. Among the things I tried over the last few weeks are making a simple wood stove and a gassifier (wood-gas burning) stove. I bought a new “ultralight” propane/butane burner and then returned it (because with a decent tin of gas it was almost as heavy as my current gas stove), I stripped the heavier bits of metalwork off that, a Rapijet, which has been a pain in the neck since I bought it, I experimented with alcohol stoves and considered hexamine solid fuel (but I’ve used that before and knew it wasn’t for me). The last thing but one that I tried was cooking by candle power, a tea light (albeit with a lot more wicks), but hot burning molten wax is hardly any less scary than hot burning alcohol (in fact probably a lot scarier) and tends to make a load of soot and smoke.
Er, don't do this...at least not without lots of safety precautions.
After the candle incident, I thought I’d have to put up with the Rapijet and forget home-made ones. I filled it again, but it started hissing out of the valve at the back, which is some kind of adjuster – maybe it’s meant to release pressure and is factory set, and maybe I moved it while I was stripping it of superfluous ironmongery – and then all I seemed to get from it was a very low flame or, if I unscrewed the adjuster a little, the adjuster itself would flash over and squirt burning gas out the wrong bit. It was the last straw with this thing, which let me down when I first used it on a cold wet night due to the cheap plastic knob rotating on its spindle, which was jammed off.
Back to the drawing board. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with many of the traditional camper’s favourite fuels and stove types. They have different strengths and weaknesses in different modes of use. Camping by car with my partner, which I do most years once or twice, I want to put a table up with twin gas burners on it and slap in a cheap can of whatever-ane with which to produce my gourmet, al-fresco feasts. But for my other camping…
My other camping is solo wild camping, not that I’ve done much of it: it’s mostly in my head, to be honest. I spend most of the winter wishing it was nice weather to camp, and then when the summer comes I start designing and making stuff and don’t get out much! Very bad. I’m hoping “my new invention” will encourage me to get more trips in this year.
Should I tell you, though? Should I divulge the secret? Should I develop the product, create a brand, manufacture it by hand in my shed? Dragon’s Den? Nah. I’m only joking. It’s not all that revolutionary – the secret is just…wait for it…
…burn charcoal
…briquette or otherwise…but…
…crushed or broken…
(sorry, yes, that really is it!).
On the other hand, it’s like doh? – wtf? – why is nobody doing this? Why are people lugging around bottles and cans of petro-chemicals? Why do they put up with the smell of fishy parafin or choke on their “smokeless” woodgas stove for ten minutes while it “gets going”?
I think a stove could be designed, and charcoal products developed, to make a wonderful backpacker stove, quick, easy, hot, pretty clean burning, pretty predictable in output, lightweight and cheap, for those who aren’t interested in knocking one up from old bean tins and smashing briquettes with a hammer. And it might just be me.
Woodgas, yeah, right on.
Why is charcoal better than wood, even in a woodgas stove? Because when you burn wood it produces a lot of gases that take some of the combustion heat to create, and you have to evaporate any remaining water even in wood that seems bone dry. The hydrogen in the carbohydrates becomes water when it combines with oxygen. Charcoal – which is produced by partially burning wood in an oxygen-depleted environment – is almost pure carbon, so it burns hotter and, given enough air, completely smokelessly as CO2 (which is “green”, “carbon-neutral” CO2, in that it comes from a non-fossil fuel). It doesn’t have to deal with all the water and other gases being produced. Woodgas burning is fine on a larger scale – I just don’t think it scales down to a backpacking stove that well. A lot of woodgas stoves are ideal for producing charcoal, and maybe I didn’t have the best woodgas stove ever, but it blackened my pans rotten, as everyone says they do. They swear blind they’re burning “clean”, burning the smoke, but that soot on the pans is unburnt carbon, char, charcoal. Go figure.
My first experimental burn of a briquette in a bean can was rubbish, but the second, with a broken/crushed charcoal briquette (just one) was a revelation. In 15 minutes I was enjoying my coffee and wondering how much more cold water I could boil on the remaining fuel that was glowing in the tin. The first boil was about 250 ml (sorry me no speaky american – it’s a decent mugful). The same amount of water from room temperature only got up to about 65 Celcius (too hot to hold) but didn’t boil.
If you try burning one charcoal briquette in a tin, it's hard work getting it going and it easily goes out.
I haven’t weighed this stuff, but it’s light. It’s charcoal, see? At least it mostly is. Briquettes have other ingredients (which some people make a fuss about, but really without much of an argument IMHO), but they’re still almost pure carbon. Or if you prefer, use natural charcoal, which I haven’t tried yet, but should work too. In fact, I can’t wait to try it. [Edit: actually, I got a shock to find they're heavier than I thought - about 50 or 60 g., but I reckon with some tweaks I can improve efficiency a lot yet.]
So anyway, here’s a few photos of the burn, and a video follows. This time I put a small piece of firelighter (more than necessary, by the way) in the base of my stove – which was designed really as a simple wood burning stove, so the big door is actually not that useful here.
Then I inserted three wire bars across and the grate that rests on it (old computer fan grill) and dropped the crushed briquette onto it, with the powdery stuff falling last onto the larger pieces.
On lighting the firelighter there was a lot of smoke at first. I thought this was another of my famously bad ideas. I grabbed my camera to document the dire failure that was developing before my eyes. The video shows the last second of smoking just before it got to flash point and from then on there was hardly a wisp. I don’t remember exactly how long it smoked, maybe 30 seconds. [Edit: and I've found that most of this can be avoided too by putting another small piece of lit firelighter on top, which ignites the exhaust gases and smoke until the charcoal gets hot enough to do that itself.]
Next, flame poured out the top, and I put my can on top of the stove on wires, although I knew that with charcoal you should really wait until they’re glowing embers – I was pretty desperate for a coffee by this time so didn’t want to waste the heat.
As the flames died down a little I was able to add the second can on top of the wires, which acts as a chimney and insulation for the top part of the kettle (which is just a beer can with a lid). Putting too many obstacles in the way can choke a fire, but this coped pretty well. I have to say that I was still being very impatient, and an even better burn and boil would have resulted from waiting longer (as the 65 degree refill shows). I was so anxious to grab every calorie from the stuff that as it died down to glowing embers completely I couldn’t be bothered to mess about putting the wires through the holes in the side of the can to support the kettle just above the coals: instead I just lowered it right onto the fuel.
Kettle sitting directly on charcoal right inside chimney, with windbreak rolled up round base for extra cozy.
The photo at the top of the article shows the condition of the charcoal on removing the kettle of boiling water. I put another brew on and began adding insulating foil and cozying it all up even more. I’ve not had any experience of burning charcoal before – I don’t even do BBQs – so I’m not sure how best to balance the airflow/insulation, but once embers are red hot it’s sensible to close things down a fair bit. I expect my chimney design will help draw air in at the bottom, and then the heat of the exhaust gaes has to hug the kettle all the way up the sides. (The second can isn’t part of the backpacking stove design, as they don’t pack up small – instead I have a wire mesh and foil extension to do the same thing.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if with some improvements in design I could boil enough water for a reconstituted meal and put the kettle back on for tea or coffee to follow. I’ll have to work on new designs and start comparing performance. I reckon there’s going to be a critical balance between increased air input for hotter burning and insulating the stove – too much draft blows a fire out. I’m not sure what’s the best workable size of crushed fuel either: in other words, the finer it is the faster it can use up the air input, but the harder it is to have it supported on a grate, or avoid it getting blown about, rising as sparks. Powdered fuel can also fuse and choke the fire – I’ve seen it with coal on an open fire when you have a lot of coal dust left in the bottom of the scuttle and pour it on.
The coal burnt in coal-fired power stations is finely powdered, but it’s blown into a furnace like petrol injected into a car’s engine. A high-tech stove might well do something similar with powdered carbon products made from char. Of course, one way to go with this is to force air through it with a PC fan or something, but I’d like to keep it low tech – but clever low tech – and avoid the weight of the fan and batteries. I want my stove to be a simple hobo stove for burning twigs when that suits me – I love the smell for one thing – but at other times (like for stealth camping) I want a cleaner burn. I think I’ve found it.
I read a funny comment on a forum the other day. I was googling to find out if and when I should do hand signals on my module 2 (the on-road part of the motorcycle test), and somebody said the most important one to remember is extending the middle finger straight up when you fail. Thankfully, I didn’t need it. I passed with three minor faults.
I’ll share some of my insights and personal advice about biking in this post, but with a couple of warnings: 1) I am not in any way qualified to teach road craft, just to ride a sub-33-brake-horsepower motorcycle; 2) I didn’t get any training myself beyond CBT, so my advice is gleaned from the web or learned from personal experience. Nevertheless, I think I can offer some helpful tips, perhaps in particular for others who choose not to get professional training and are rooting around the web trying to make sense of the often conflicting information.
Camping beside the Cleveland Way near Sneck Yate Bank. My adapted racing bike and Terra Nova Competition one-person tent.
I suppose I really ought to begin this with an apology to the owner of this lovely piece of land, not that you’re likely to read my blog – you’re probably far too busy trying to eke out a living working the land – but if you do…sorry. I didn’t ask your permission to camp the night, partly because I didn’t know where to find you, but mainly because I was utterly exhausted. The second thing I should do is appeal to every other wild camper to respect the countryside and leave it, within reason, as we find it. Wild camping and “stealth” camping are slightly thorny issues, but the bottom line is that, in most of the prettier parts of England, we are tresspassing, strictly speaking, on many occasions, if we don’t ask permission to camp, and the practice is only as common as it is because of the generally good nature of landowners (and, perhaps, the hassle and expense of trying to sue someone). I might get into all that again later, but for now I just want to write a bit about my camping trip.
Here’s the bike, a Marinoni frame with mostly the original Campagnolo fixtures.
I can’t believe it’s so long since I last wrote here. I knew it was a fair while, but not best part of four months! I never said how the Honda CBR 125 turned out for me, or even whether I eventually took delivery of it.
Going back to the garage about the squeak!
I did, and to be honest it’s been a bit of a let down. I’m beginning to enjoy it in recent months, but only on fairly short runs, and there was a long time when I didn’t want to bother with it. While I was still waiting for it to arrive I began doing up my push-bike, and by the time it did I would have preferred not to have bought it at all.
It’s ok I suppose, but the main thing about it is that it’s not really for me. All my careful deliberation on the theory of what sort of bike I wanted was pretty well wasted time, mainly because I’m getting on a bit and am more susceptible to aches and pains, especially from chills in the breeze whilst riding in slightly awkward positions. I couldn’t take it for a test ride, of course, which might have flagged the problem up, but I soon found that the racing style – a relatively hard and narrow seat combined with low bars – meant that I was quite uncomfortable after only a few miles, both in the deriere and neck area.
The latter was certainly made worse by a cycle trip on my push-bike, carrying an insane amount of gear in four panniers, tail pack and handlebar bag, 35 miles up onto the North Yorkshire moors (via White Horse Hill, which took me about an hour to push the thing up!), and back the following day. It was my first cycle-camping trip since I was in my twenties, and I caused myself such dreadful pain in the neck that I phoned “her indoors” with about the last 12 miles to go and got her to pick me up in the car. Even so, my neck has been really bad since then. I have got to keep it warm if I go out on either machine now. I’m doing some remedial yoga to help keep it loosened up as the Autumn comes on. Read the rest of this entry »
I can’t believe how stressful the last month has been, or that it’s nearly a month since I passed my CBT. It’s taken quite a long time to choose a bike and find a suitable one to buy, made more difficult by not having much access to my car, since my partner uses it through the week and some weekends too, and I suppose by my rather obsessive nature – all that research on 125s online.
I might have bought a bike that was ready to ride away, but I wanted to get one from a dealer for my relative peace of mind, and they generally need servicing before you collect them. I put the deposit down on mine last Saturday, and it’s now Friday, which was when I was going to pick it up. In the interim I’ve got my insurance and I’m ready, but I already phoned to put it off.
It was quite windy yesterday, and I checked the Met Office website for a forecast: the last thing I wanted to do was ride my new bike away from the shop in a gale. Looking out, I decided that how it was then was somewhere near my limit – if it was easing off tomorrow I’d be ok, but if it was about the same or worse I shouldn’t risk it. You need some time to get used to a new bike, and one of the most dangerous conditions for riding is high winds, especially with strong gusts. The windspeed in the Yorkshire region, according to the Met Office, was 18 mph, gusting up to 34 mph. The forecast for today was for winds of 26 mph with gusts up to 41 mph. Saturday (tomorrow) was back to Thursday’s kind of speeds, and Sunday was supposed to be as calm as a millpond. Since it made sense to avoid the Saturday shopper traffic, too, for my first ride, I phoned and said I’d pick it up on Sunday. I think they were glad of the extra time to fit their servicing in.
There’s really no way I’d set off to ride a bike in this. I’ve checked the website again and it’s worse than yesterday’s forecast, 23 mph with gusts to 43 mph. The steady windspeed is slightly less than yesterday’s forecast said, but it’s the gusts that really cause you hell on a bike. With more experience I might be able to cope with this wind, but I’ve no idea how the bike handles, and it will take some time riding in more moderate conditions, or in this level of wind over short distances on clear roads, to be able to gauge it accurately. I’ve never ridden a bike with such extensive fairing cover, which will help it slice through a headwind nicely, but could act as a big sail to sidewinds.
Winds, especially blustery ones, are about the worst conditions for a bike, particularly because there is almost nothing you can do to compensate. There are a few things you can do, which I’ll relate below, but unlike rain, cold or snow, high winds can just make it impossible – or extremely dangerous – to ride at all, perhaps even more certainly than patches of ice on the road. Bikers are a little like ancient mariners – we have to wait for a favourable wind – although in our case it’s better if it’s dead calm or a steady light wind (and, of course, from behind). Like the captains of sailing ships, we’re stuck in port if it gets too violent out there. Read the rest of this entry »
I chose my new bike today at Castle Motorcycles, Castleford. Here she is:
Pic of my bike
Now, I’m not going to bang on about this particular bike and how it’s the best bike in the world and all that…yet. First, I thought I’d share some of the decision-making process that I’ve been through over the last three weeks. I’m hoping that my experience might be of some use to others getting into motorcycling, or returning to it, and choosing a learner-legal 125. It might be of particular interest to other old fogies and mid-life-critical ex-bikers like myself, but if you’re a teenager and have an open mind, you might just learn something too, you never know. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by lettersquash 
