Coke Can Stove

Here’s a little trick I picked up while browsing the web at one point – a camping stove made from an old soda can! I put this together for a grand total of $3.29 – the price of a 1ft by 2ft piece of hardware cloth!

Part 1: The Stove

Take a can of Coke/pop/soda (depending on where you are from), and, using a Dremel, cut out most of the top, as shown in the picture. Then drill a bunch of small (~3/32″) holes in the sloped part of the can. I think I tried for 16 holes, and did it by eye. I probably ended up with 14-15 of variously sized holes. That doesn’t really matter though.

Next, carefully Dremel a roughly 2 inch section out of the middle of the soda can. Recycle this, or keep it for shim stock for other projects.

Now, carefully put the left over bottom and top halves together. In my case, this took Dremeling a slit on one side and forcing the two halves together, but if you can do it without making slits, that’s better.

Voila, there you have your stove! I sprayed it with flat black bedliner, just to make it prettier, but you don’t have to. Fill it with rubbing alcohol, light it (I don’t recommend lighting it Hibachi-style by dipping your finger in alcohol, lighting that, and then dipping your burning finger into the stove ), and enjoy!

Pot Holder Parts. Click to Enlarge.

Part 2: The Pot Holder

Get a small amount of 1/2″x1/2″ hardware cloth. I got galvanized and then spray-painted it flat olive green. The alternative is to get the green-vinyl-covered kind and save yourself the work.

Cut four pieces as shown in the picture (note that I left the ‘ends’ on the top and bottom left ones, and then bent them over into hooks. TIP: after cutting, about 10 minutes with the Dremel would be well spent smoothing off the cuts, so the sharp edges wouldn’t snag things in your pack. When you’re done, paint the hardware cloth if you like, and assemble the four pieces into a box shape, checking that you can fold the assembled box flat into your pack.

Try it out!

Trying to Boil Water

Stick a pot on top of the holder, light the stove, and see if you can boil some water!

I tried, using isopropanol (rubbing alcohol) with marginal results. The water started steaming very quickly, but after 10 minutes, still hadn’t boiled a few ounces of water. Also, at the end of the exercise, the bottom of the pot was just coated in black, with some soot coming up the sides as well.

So, don’t expect to be able to boil water on this little stove (at least using rubbing alcohol), but it can definitely heat water up enough to distill!

Future Research

Since I work in combustion engineering (mainly in Diesel engines), naturally, I’m curious as to what would improve our little stove. Some thoughts:

• Decrease the percentage of water in the alcohol. Standard rubbing alcohol is usually about 30% water by volume, and all that water does is sit there sucking up heat that could be being transferred into the bottom of the pot.
• Switch to vodka or ethanol-based rubbing alcohol. I would be surprised if this helped much, if any, as there will still be water in the mixture, and in the case of vodka, there will be more water than in isopropyl rubbing alcohol.
• Try different, cheap, flammable, household chemicals. This would have to be done very carefully, because of obvious considerations — safety and health concerns. Could I burn gasoline or brake cleaner in my little stove? Yes. would it be smart to have explosive carcinogens that close to my food? Unless you hate me, no; and if you do hate me, why are you exposing yourself to me by reading this?
• The soot on the bottom of the pot means that my stove is burning very rich. I could try to increase the size of the holes in the stove, or otherwise improve airflow, so the air-fuel ratio would be closer to stoichiometric (neither too much fuel, nor too little fuel). Things usually burn hottest near a stoichiometric air-fuel ratio.

I’ll experiment some more and post up what I find!