V3 Winter Vortex Stove – a Small Tweak

[Roger Caffin]

I have been really happy with my V3 Vortex Stove on a number of trips recently, but there’s always room for improvement. I was chatting with one customer who had just bought one of these stoves and was wondering whether he could try some tweaks himself. Of course – it’s his stove now, isn’t it?

But his comments got me thinking. One of the changes from V2 to V3 was a redesign of the stove legs and pot supports to make them easier to set up.

I think the V3 is easier to set up for a small pot, although the V2 is stronger for a large pot. But you still have to get all 4 legs into the stove body before rotating the little retainer thing which holds them in place. The real trick is keeping all four legs fully seated until you do rotate the retainer. That’s not hard to do, but is there any way it could be made even easier?

So I was playing around with some ideas about this, and wondered whether I could have just a single slot in the retaining disk, as shown here. Rotate to 1st leg position, insert leg, rotate to 2nd leg position, rotate to 3rd … and so on. That may sound more complex, but it does mean that you only have to worry about one leg at a time. Once in place, each leg will stay in place.

I made some out of aluminium, and once I got the diameter right the idea worked, so I made a couple out of 0.55 mm thick Ti 6Al-4V sheet. They work just fine.

Which is better? Frankly, I don’t think there is very much in it. But hackers must hack :)

Cheers

PS: I have a few left – not many.

 

[Adam Kilpatrick]

Superb Roger :-)

[Roger Caffin]

Thank you Adam.

Cheers

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