Camp cooking with wood fired stoves

[njc110381]

Hi guys. I've not been on here for some time so forgive me if this has been covered recently.

We've been having a chat over on one of the shoot forums about Kelly kettles. Now they look like a great idea but I don't tend to do hot drinks often so my main interest is in the cooking kit. Although the kettle is said to be good I get the impression that the cooking set may not be so great? Do any of you use them (I'm sure some of you must do)? Are they good? The Kettle would only be useful for making pot noodles and other dehydrated food, which I'm trying to grow out of. I'd much rather do the woods a favour and eat a grey squirrel these days! So...

After a lot of browsing on the net I've found other cookers which look better. I'm not sure if they are, but they look fun? Have a look and see what you think....

1. http://www.thebushcraftstore.co.uk/...--complete-set-with-zebra-billy-tin-690-p.asp
This one looks very good to me.

2. http://www.surplusandoutdoors.com/s...eous/new-army-swiss-issue-volcano-690596.html
This one is cheap and functional but it has some problems. First I can see myself burning my lips on the cup, and second the sooty base of the cup is exposed after use which will get me dirty too!

3. http://www.bushbuddy.ca/indexs.html
Looks smart and fits inside the mentioned cooking pot. I like this one but it looks like the flames could get blown off of the bottom of the pan easily meaning it will take ages to do the job?

So, what do you think of them? I like the look of #1 the best but as I've never used anything like this I could well be wrong!

 

[Adze]

You can make a hobo stove out of more or less anything which won't itself burn - I made one from a homebrew kit tin recently which works quite well and I made one from a junk shop stainless cutlery drainer (bought for a quid with a stainless kettle thrown in) earlier today in about 30 minutes.

For what you get in the bushcraft store hobo stove it looks like a fair price (usual stuff about no affiliation etc.) You wouldn't save yourself much, if anything at all, buying it all separately.

There's a few hobo stove threads knocking about - well worth a look to see what's possible

Cheers,

 

[locum76]

I believe Warthog19** makes some good stoves.

 

[njc110381]

Thanks for the replies chaps. After a bit of a browse around the forum I've found a couple of topics about your stoves and they all look very similar. I was wondering if I could save some money on the hobo by making it from a tin or something but by the time I've driven to a shop to buy the stuff and then built it I probably wont save a lot as you say.

My only concern is the size of the billy. What's the approximate capacity of a 4" billy? I'm picturing something pretty small!

 

[Adze]

My only concern is the size of the billy. What's the approximate capacity of a 4" billy? I'm picturing something pretty small!

About a litre if you brim it... for practical purposes not more than 750ml or so. Nice thing about the hobo is it's just the heat source, you can put a much larger pan/billy on provided the hobo is stable enough and the pan doesn't seal the top of the stove.

We cooked sausages and bacon in a 30cm frying pan the other day and after we'd wedged the hobo upright so it couldn't fall over and made some split green sticks to hold the pan off the top, it worked a treat. Some tent pegs through the bottom of it to stabilize it and some wire pot stands would be a more permanent way of doing it.

It also depends on how big a tin you make the hobo out of, as to what you can use it for. A cutlery drainer is really a one person stove - two at a push - but I've got a couple of 25 litre cooking oil tins I'm going to convert and have a play with soon, I daresay that would be more the sort of thing you're looking for if there's five or more in the group.

 

[njc110381]

Well I'll often be cooking for just myself but at work I'll need to cook for two. That's two busy (and greedy) outdoor workers too so half a tin of soup each isn't going to go down at all well!

The kit is going to be too small by the sound of things. What I really need to do is find the capacity of all of them, but I've not found a website offering that kind of info yet. I would like the pan to fit inside the Hobo ideally but I guess the Hobo inside the pan wouldn't hurt!

EDIT... Found it! http://www.zebra-head.com/en/produc...ry=false&subcategoryid=0000000006&categoryid=

I need the 12cm one I recon. 1.4l

 

[njc110381]

I've e-mailed them to ask if the 12cm billy will fit in the hobo. If not does anyone know where I could get a stainless 13-14cm cutlery drainer? I've been searching the net since my last post and can't find anything, then I figured it would be a lot quicker to ask if any of you have one and if so where did it come from?!

 

[slammer187]

That hobo stove over at the Bushcraft store is just a "Cutlery Caddy" from Ikea which costs around 4 pounds!

Instead of buying a BushBuddy or BushCooker you can just make a Wood Gas Stove from tin cans and here's a link for one of my videos about how to make one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQyJQb8fe_g

 

[BushEd]

make it all yourself. find a 12cm stainless biscuit tin, wilkinsons etc. cost about £3 and after sticking a bale on work just as well. I'm fairly sure someone said on another post that the 12cm zebra billy's do Not fit inside the Ikea drainer, which is 12cm dia itself. So either a slightly bigger drainer, or a slightly bigger pot

Or, I really like the look of these:

http://www.canoepaddler.me.uk/fireboxes.htm

Can be used with any pan...

 

[slammer187]

make it all yourself. find a 12cm stainless biscuit tin, wilkinsons etc. cost about £3 and after sticking a bale on work just as well. I'm fairly sure someone said on another post that the 12cm zebra billy's do Not fit inside the Ikea drainer, which is 12cm dia itself. So either a slightly bigger drainer, or a slightly bigger pot

Or, I really like the look of these:

http://www.canoepaddler.me.uk/fireboxes.htm

Can be used with any pan...

Ikea also sell a slightly larger drainer which should fit a zebra billy!