A cheap ultralight blower stove
The ‘Student’ ultralight blower stove is designed to be light, cheap and simple and is made from a 425g tuna tin, to match the skimpy budget of a student. If used with care it will have a short but useful life. Students can afford tuna as it a wonderful, inexpensive and healthy food. So you or your mates should have plenty of replacement tins.
The tools required are a side-cutting can opener, tin snips or strong scissors, step drill (to 200mm dia) and a metal file or sand paper to make edges smooth.
Any tuna tin will do. “However not all tuna tins are born equal”. Some of the tins are molded with no seam on the bottom or the side. They are strong, light and are suitable if you are to make a stove with a ‘fixed stove bottom’ for ‘leave-no-trace’ cooking. An example of such a tin is the Portview brand Sandwich Tuna Flakes In oil, from Aldi (shown below).
Another type of tuna tin (eg Woolworths Essentials tuna chunks in oil 425g) has seams on the side, top and bottom and the side. For stacking purposes the bottom has a smaller diameter than the top. This smaller end can be cut off with a side cutting can opener to make an ultralight bottomless stove. “Good if you like to save every gram of backpacking weight that you can.”
A stove with a bottom is also more versatile, as it can be easily shifted into a new location without disrupting the charcoal bed. Also, to work well a bottomless blower stove must ‘seal’ well to the ground so that the exhaust and flames largely exit through the intended ports. When the soil or earth surface is not conducive to such sealing, the bottom is essential as is the case if the stove is to be sat on gravel or rocks. In this case, the neat lid that has been cut off can still be dropped into the can to make it have a bottom if required to provide ‘leave-no-trace’ cooking.
To set up the stove insert the blower tip and connect the blower fan to this tip via the air tube. Set the fan shutter to the closed position and have the power supply plug inserted but not quite connected. Please see addendum at the bottom of this page about using an air tube extension to put the blower fan out of reach of flames during gusts of wind. For details on my preferred start-up procedure, please see Stove-Startup.
The student stove is small but it still can cook a large meal quite quickly.
Running the stove on pure charcoal is easy and effective and this produces very high temperatures and very little flame. However, such temperatures can greatly shorten the stoves’ life. (for more on stove survival see Burning Wood and Charcoal.
Where possible I keep the stove dry and clean and coat with a smear of olive oil when stored. This will give the stove a long life.
Addendum. To keep the fan and power supply out of reach of the flame during wind gusts (with stoves without the protection of a wing wall) I now use a simple air tube extension as in the photo below. Also, note the cut off tuna tin (a second one) that makes a nice cover for the stove parts during backpacking.
Tim
