The Stove Collector

Technologies

Piezo igniters

The Piezo igniter is found frequently on gas burners today, eliminating the need for matches and similar.

Fuel bottles

Transporting stove fuel on backpacking trips have always been a challenge. Glass bottles can break, steel bottles are heavy, and plastic can melt or be punctured - with potentially disastrous results. For long trips in the wilderness the safe storage of stove fuel can be a life-or-death issue. However, during the last decade new technology have given us a satisfying solution - ultralight metal bottles.

Wind screens

The enemy of all stoves is wind. Wind and draft steals heat, cools jets and blows out the flame. While some stoves have wind screens of varying effectivity built in, most stoves benefit from being placed somewhere with little or no wind. Placing the stove inside a room or a tent is an obvious but not always safe choice. Often a tucked-in corner between a couple of stoves improves the stove's fire considerably. Many have built their own screens from paint buckets, tin boxes and similar. It is now possible to purchase light-metal screens that can be folded or even rolled up for transport.

Draught shields

Classic kerosene stoves often had a metal coat around the spirit cup; two halves hinged together to form a pipe when assempled. There alwas was a hole to put the match through. How effective it really is, is questionable.

Preheating fuel

Kerosene need to be preheated in order to vaporise; become a gas that'll burn well. Kerosene stoves are always equipped with a small cup below the jet where preheating fuel - usually alcohol in some form - can be filled. The best fuel is non-liquid alcohol paste, but most people use liquid alcohol. Spilling alcohol while filling up the cup is a fairly good recipe for a wild fire. Use a small bottle for this, or non-liquid paste if available.

Burners, silent and roaring

Burners are the devices where the vaporized fuel is ignited and the flame distributed. The design varies with fuel and type of burner, but most more-or-less-standard older stoves share the same handful of burner designs. A minority of small-sized stoves have utilized the loop design, which is technically identical to paint strippers or ski-wax melting loops. There are also other designs.

Classic kerosene stoves usually have a roaring or a silent burner. The reason for two differing designs here  is that the latter is less noisy but more prone to be killed by wind. As far as I know, silent and roarer burners can be interchanged without problems. Visual identification is easy - the silent roarer is round or rounded-off on the top, while the roarer is flat and has what looks like a raised X at the top.

The hole where the gas exits the roater is called the jet nozzle.

Jet nozzles

Kerosene and white gas stoves blows the gas out from the pipe through a small jet hole. As most liquids has small amounts of unwanted dust particles or other alien elements, this hole will clog - quite often too, if a non-pure liquid is used. As this is a common problem, a jet cleaning pin is a tool most stove owners have. The classic factory version is a thin 5-mm-long wire needle on a crude paper-thin metal handle. Of course, in an emergency you can use any other handy thin metal pin provided you can get access to the jet hole with it. The jet cleaning pin should be a part of any stove backpacker's standard kit.

Some times the jet nozzle is so badly clogged up that some cleaning fluid must be applied; common house vinegar or simply warm soap water does the trick. Be aware that vinegar is acidic and will color the brass.

Support rods

Most stoves are intended for having a pot placed on top of them. To create a stable platform the traditional solution was to have three long rods go from the ground, equally spaced around the tank and forming a loose crown over the flame. The crudest ones were simply soldered on to the tank, especially for the larger low-budget models. In the worst cases the rods were simply made out of iron, and the welding of them on brass tanks is not a pretty sight. The smaller collapsible stoves had nimbler solutions with lower legs that would fold inward and upper detachable rods. On better models there would be a pan support on the top of the rod crown.

Pan supports

Loose pan supports are a typical feature of old kerosene stoves. They were not strictly necessary to the stoves' functionality as the rods the pan supports rested on worked almost just as well as supports. In addition, these were frequently made out of (heavy!) cast iron and often rusted to pieces. In some cases the pan supports were made out of more durable brass, but finding an old stove with a pan support is something of a find.

Brass tanks

The original 19-century kerosene pressure stoves were made from brass as the metal was well suited to being stretched into shape and took the heat well, and the pretty design have been hanging on ever after in spite of other metals becoming as viable for the manufacture.

Not all brass tanks are actually all brass as such , but are plated with brass or nickel to get the popular finish. In the database on these sites, the word brass is used for all those tanks unless I am absolutely sure that it's something else.

Spanner keys

Most of the collapsible kerosene stoves that came in a tin box included a spanner, which was to be used for attaching and detaching the burner from the tank. A standard adjustable spanner works just as well for the purpose, which is good as many second-hand stoves seem to have the spanner missing. One bit of warning - if a burner is stuck hard, adding more force may not be the best choice. Try some dissolving liquid or very gentle tugging both ways for a while.