[at-l] Alcohol stove making at the Ruck?

[motbe at cox.net (motbe@cox.net)]

It's something that I saw Ray Garlington post about somewhere (maybe here or PCT-L)..   

Really, it boils water in about 10 minutes using 2 oz of pencil sized sticks (that's about a handful).  The stove burns for about 20 minutes, and does so virtually smoke free. 

The process that it burns the wood is called gassification, which really just means that the gasses that come from the wood are burning and causing heat.  The wood burns from the top down, and the top layer is pretty much charcoal, through which the smoke and other gasses from the bottom layers of burning wood pass through and ignite.  The fire burns extremely hot, and the added wait of using it versus an alcohol stove is great (plus there's no batteries or etc like the forced air wood stoves).  In the end you have a small pile of fine ash, which can be stomped into the ground (as Jardine would put it) or disposed of in a fire pit.  That was probably a bad explanation of the whole process (was never my study in college), but you can find info on it on Ray's page listed below.

There was alot of research done to build smoke free stoves for third world countries, and Ray took that research and designed a lightweight stove that does nearly the same thing.  You can read more about the stove on his site:

http://www.garlington.biz/Ray/WoodGasStove/index.htm

Alot of the physics of the stove go counter to what you would imagine happening.  It is quite an incredible stove (simple to make too).

Daniel