Kelly Kettle – Great stove idea

[David Lewis]

Leave it too Lee Valley Tools to find something totally freekin’ cool!!!! Has anyone ever heard of a Kelly Kettle?! Apparently they have been around forever. It’s a double-walled kettle with chimney in the center. Hard to explain… easy to understand when you see it…

Wow!!! Brilliant! If only they made a 16 oz version out of Ti!!! I mean… all most of us lightweighters use a stove for is to heat water… we don’t need an open top vessel for cooking.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to think how to build something like this… but I’m coming up empty… so I put it to the group :)

Here’s the Lee Valley Tools page for the Kelly Kettle.

[paul johnson]

Have one – the smaller size. Relatively heavy and takes up a bit of space in the pack. Plenty of fuel everywhere. Small twigs (easy to cut using pruning shears – borrowed this idea from Dr.J), pine cones, dry leaves. Never timed heating water. Only used mine a few times. Heard about it from Dr.J who apparently likes his.

[Vick Hines]

Yeah, David, These puppies HAVE been around forever. You used to be able to get them (maybe still can)in N. Africa where they are called ‘volcanos’ and are made of tinned copper – and soldered with lead, of course.

If you are experimental and good with metal, I’ll bet you could make one with aluminum using rolled seams sealed with food-grade rubber adhesive – like a tin can. Temperatures would be within its operating range as long as the kettle never went dry.

[David Lewis]

It is a brilliant design idea… but I’m not as excited about it now as I was last night… I just realized that with this type of stove… I would lose all the multi-use capabilities of my beer can stove… I’d lose my cereal bowl, tea cup and water pail!!! Can’t have that. I like my 4-in-1 stove :)

[Jason Klass]

Good point David! Besides, it’s waaaay too heavy. I agree, clever design but impractical.

[David Lewis]

Oh… I would never use it as is. I think you could cut some weight off of it… the first things that come to mind are the cork, chain and heavy bail and wooden handle… but it would still be heavy… unless you wanted to go one step further and cut 1/4 right off the top of the thing… but that might compomise the sturdiness of the pot. My thought was more about… this is a neat idea… I wonder if we can use this idea to build something similar that is lighter in weight.

[Franco Darioli]

Great idea. I have used a version of the Kelly in NZ for car camping, it was ,from memory, at least a 1.5L possibly a 2L version. It was fast and efficient, came to a roaring boil in five minutes or so (?) with not much more than a few twigs.
Someone should make a titanium version, around 700ml (24oz) capacity. I think that the walls could be rather thin providing there is water inside at all times.For freezer bag cooking it could be ideal on a 5 to 10 day cold weather trip. Can someone work out the weight required to be more efficient than canister or alcohol stoves? ( for 2 people, around 6 pints per day)
Franco

[Ryan Jordan]

I love the Kelly Kettle. Mine has a 16 oz reservoir, and the kettle itself weighs about (stock weight) is 20 ounces. If you hack off the chain, cork, and handle, you end up at around 18 ounces.

But you have to add back some wire for a handle and a piece of wire to replace the chain. I’ve used piano wire (total added back is 0.2 oz). These two pieces are useful for pouring water out of the kettle, and of course, toting it around.

The main disadvantage of the KK is the volume. It’s big and takes a lot of room in the pack. But heck, most of us have room to spare in our packs, so…not a huge deal.

The KK will be featured in BPL’s upcoming Wood Stove Review Summary which will appear later this summer, alongside a whole bunch of other wood stove designs, all of them commercially available.

Of the entire lot that is being tested, the KK far and away uses (1) the least amount of fuel, (2) burns wood most efficiently (ie to ash), and (3) burns the most different types of wood efficiently. I think it’s the best designed wood cooker available for really crappy, wet, fuel sources. 3-5 minute boil times per pint are not at all unreasonable with the KK.

If it wasn’t so darned big, and heavy, I’d consider taking it on my Arctic trek. However, I’m in need of something more compact and that will work with a conventional pot that will hold more prodigious quantities of food, which of course, the KK can’t do – it’s strictly a water boiler.

So instead, I’ll be taking a 4 oz double wall, stainless wood gas stove that nests nicely into a 0.9L Snowpeak ti pot that is nearly as efficient as the KK but a whole lot lighter and smaller. More on that one soon enough, but here it is in action:

[Joshua Mitchell]

A new item for the store? Or a review of a manufacturers current model?

[Ryan Faulkner]

or a DIY stove?

We need details :-)

[Jason Smith]

I’m with Ryan here :-)

[Miguel Arboleda]

From what I can make out in the photo the stove looks remarkably like the now defunct BushBuddy CookStove, a commercial attempt in 1999 at bringing the inverted downdraft gassifier wood burning stove to hikers. It just looks a little stumpy for an inverted downdraft gassifier (woodgas stove) though. How exactly is there enough depth to the stove to allow the wood to gassify? I’m very curious about this stove.

[Joshua Mitchell]

Miguel,

Nice catch, the stove does appear to have similar physical designs as that 500 series. However, if you notice the stand is different from the pick that… however that doesn’t mean someone, somewhere hasn’t resurrected the device.

I, too, am curious to stumpy’s ability to truly gassify wood… but maybe combine with a vortexing airflow (though it doesn’t appear to sport such) it does gassify. Or, maybe it simply partially gassifies in order to achieve better combustion effeciency than a normal stove, though not as effecient as a true IDDWG stove.

[Roger Caffin]

> Someone should make a titanium version, around 700ml (24oz) capacity. I think that the walls could be rather thin providing there is water inside at all times

Actually, Ryan had us look at that one. Um … YOU try welding or seam-rolling titanium! This is NOT a metal you can easily play around with. Sigh.

[David Lewis]

Still… a small aluminum version could be made much lighter I think.

[Bill Fornshell]

Roger Caffin said:
“Actually, Ryan had us look at that one. Um … YOU try welding or seam-rolling titanium! This is NOT a metal you can easily play around with. Sigh.”

Reply:
I have played with round wood stoves but I wanted one I could fold flat. A Titanium version of what ever is in the pictire would not be that hard to make. To bad the picture doesn’t show more detail or I might show you how easy it would be to make one out of Titanium.

It is just like working with Cuben Fiber. Just think a little and work around its negatives.

[David Lewis]

What picture Bill? There are three pictures in the thread. The rolled seams with Ti comment was specific, I believe, to making a Kelly Kettle… as shown in the first post.

[Bill Fornshell]

David,
The picture I am refereing to is from Ryan’s post dated:
SUBJECT Re: Re: Kelly Kettle – ON 06/05/2006 10:23:33 MDT

[It is the eight post in this thread.]
He talks about the stove as:

“So instead, I’ll be taking a 4 oz double wall, stainless wood gas stove that nests nicely into a 0.9L Snowpeak ti pot that is nearly as efficient as the KK but a whole lot lighter and smaller. More on that one soon enough, but here it is in action:”

[Joshua Mitchell]

It could work, though… and be simpler / more controlled than hacking up some of the snowpeak single wall cups (http://www.snowpeak.com/gears/mg001.htm)

[Worth Donaldson]

I have used the smaller one on wilderness canoe trips into the Canadian bush for several years and have been quite please until last year. We were in the transition zone for the tundra and it rained every day. The river was severely flooded. It was hard to find dry land. Everything was wet. It was extremely difficult to find dry wood. Even the dead stuff standing was wet all the way through. The only way you could start a fire was by splitting wood to get to the center. My kettle was useless for most of the trip. I now recommend having a backup.

[Ryan Faulkner]

It says on the arctic 1000 website that RJ’s wood stove is a custon bushbuddy stove

I have one question, It says in the description on the previous page that it is a double wall wood gas stove. What dose “Double wall” mean, it cant be like double wall in an alc. stove

[Jay Ham]

Bill,

That’s the picture of what Ryan ended up with. What Ryan was asking Roger and I to create would be a “kelly kettle”-like stove. This would have the “stove” part, which would have been easy enough to make, but it would also have an incorporated “pot” like the kelly kettle in the first post of this thread. It would therefore need to be water tight. I don’t think this would be easy to create without ti welding experience.

Jay
MYOG

[Christopher Plesko]

I’m not able to offer it yet but this winter I hope to have my TIG setup to weld Ti. Anyone curious about a prototype can let me know…

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