Durable alcohol cat stove?

Try and find an Aluminum can in that style

My 12-10 stove made from a coke and v8 can is going strong from 2008 with hundreds of night on it.

Take a look at the White Box alcohol stove. Side burner that functions as the pot support.

if your pot is wide you might try a side-burner with a rolled rim like the on Batchstovez makes. They are extremely strong and seem to work well as long as you are not trying to heat a small mug on it.

Evernew makes a titanium alcohol stove that is double walled I think. Very solid, I guess it might be a little heavier than the more fragile stoves out there (34 gram).

Evernew EBY254 Titanium Alcohol Stove

I have pretty much made and /or used them all.

If you make a Super Cat stove from a 3oz Aluminum can. there simply is no rust issue. Unless you purposely try to destroy it, it will last a lot longer than some cookpots people use.:)

If you keep the stove in a small ziplock bag inside your cookpot, IMHO,the durability issue is moot.

I bought a Evernew stove, and frankly given the fact I can build and use a perfectly good SuperCat which performs just as well and is 1/4 the weight, it was a waste of $45.

Thank you. I do like the White Box stove but am looking something I can go more multifuel if I need to with it.  Do they make the cat food cans or something similar in aluminum and if so what brands should I be looking for?

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1. If it is rusting, it is probably a steel can: test it with a magnet
2. If it is hard to punch, then it is probably a steel can, punching Fancy Feast cans is pretty easy

my 2 cents

Yeah, if your cat food can stove rusted then you may not have done it right to begin with. The steel cans work just fine in most conditions, but a lot of authorities say that you need the better heat conductivity of aluminum in bad cold. The heat from the flame is conducted to the fuel to warm it and keep it vaporizing adequately. (And titanium is an even worse conductor.)
If you want durability, I am absolutely certain that I have seen alcohol stoves for sale that were basically center-burner SuperCat-style stoves milled from incredibly thick aluminum stock, but I cannot remember the manufacturer. Perhaps it was an old Minibull design? Google around.
There are also a number of home-made designs using somewhat-thicker aluminum beer bottles rather than aluminum cans. There’s one on Instructibles. Also, BatchStoves makes a damned sturdy-looking one. But if you’re in the market for durable and are willing to carry something (comparatively) heavy then why not go old school? Trangia. It’s kind of hard to argue with their track record when they’ve been cooking Swedish rations since 1925, but note- unlike the SuperCat they do require a pot stand. When you think about it the Trangia is quite a winner. It has a lid and it’s big enough to just fill it for a weekend without needing to carry more fuel. If they’d just make them out of something lighter than brass and steel that’d be nice. Evernew does make what is obviously a titanium Trangia knock-off, as noted above, though it lacks a lid.

The Fancee Feest stove is made with an aluminum cat food can and has an integrated stainless steel pot support. You can learn how to make one by reading the info in the DIY Gear Forum at whiteblaze.net:
http://whiteblaze.net/forum/showthread.php/27262-Fancyfeast-Stove

Watch the video made by Sean Emery aka “Shug”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKAFAsPfC4s

If you keep calling it a “Fancee Feast” stove on BPL, sooner or later the alcohol stove mafia will get you. ;)

Skurka caught a lot of flak for that.

Dean,

Actually.,Dan’s stove IS the origional Fancy Feast stove. He designed it and named it that before Skurka ever decided to rename the Supercat to suit his own purposes.

Anyone with the ability to do a google search can find the history of both stoves going back nearly ten years on forums like Whiteblaze.

I believe that Jim Wood was the one to name it Super Cat.
From this 2005 article :
http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/index-orig.html
Skurka started to use the Fancy Feast in 2006

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multi Fuel alcohol stoves…
Zelph made one that could burn alcohol and White Spirit (from memory…) and there are some that can hold an Esbit tablet but apart from that if you want an alcohol stove that is all you get.

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I just punch two rows of holes in mine at the top.  Been in binds where the only thing available was unleaded and diesel.

I guess diesel would be safe but I don’t know about unleaded.

HEET is an alternative I am sure you know about that can be found in any gas station north of the Mason-Dixon Line and many further south.

My real question though is while many (myself included) have recomended aluminum, would thin wall aluminum hold up to the heat of unleaded?  I guess it would at least for a short time, but something worth looking into if you are determined to go that route.

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It is not that stuff like that happens much but sometimes you really get out there away from everyone, bumming around and all you can find is about half a bottle of 5w30 or an 1/8 of a gallon left in someone’s gas can that they will part with when you come upon a vehicle.

I would not even think of burning gasoline in anything but a professionally made dedicated stove .
(I’m almost too old for a Darwin award anyway)

Yeah, I’ll second that. I would only burn alcohol in an alcohol stove. Especially an aluminum one. And sure as HELL not in any of the pressurized designs.

That said, the gasoline stoves I’ve seen are usually just a re-purposed steel can with a puddle of burning gas in it. I really would not want to set the pot directly on the stove as with a cat food can stove. I’d get a pot stand to hold it up a bit.

By “multi-fuel” I thought you all were talking about esbit and wood, which is really just a matter of the pot stand and windscreen, not the stove.