I recently scored a venerable Optimus 00 paraffin stove for £18 on ebay, spent £5 on a washer kit and an enjoyable couple of hours fettling it and polishing the brass tank up to its as-new 1960s glory. That thing is beautiful, eye-catching, tactile and somehow reassuring.
I put paraffin in the tank and alcohol in the priming cup, lit the alky and while it was preheating the burner, I pricked the jet. With a pricker, obviously. When the alcohol was nearly consumed I closed the air screw in the filler cap, gave a gentle stroke on the pump and held my breath. There was a small flame at the jet, I pumped once more and there was a faint hissing roar. After several seconds more, I gave 10 pumps or so and my one pint wonder sprang into roaring life and I was transported back over 50 years by the sound and smell of the one-time world's most popular camping stove. It was wonderful: nostalgia is powerful stuff.
I boiled water and made coffee, a happy bunny. Ok, it's heavier than modern stoves but to offset that, a full tank will serve for a weekend at least and paraffin / kerosene is a safer and less volatile fuel than unleaded gasoline or alcohol. True, you need alcohol to prime the thing but the alcohol used to make a brew or two in an alcohol stove would be sufficient for a week's priming duties. Additionally, if you need a bigger, hotter flame, just pump it up. If you want a low simmer, bleed some of the tank air out until you have the flame you want; these things are controllable. And if the flame gets blown out, you can relight it just like a gas stove if you don't delay too much.
The days when you could buy paraffin from a pump at the petrol station are long gone but you can still buy it at garden centres and B&Q, who sell it for fuelling greenhouse heaters. You can also run them on 28sec central heating oil, which is close to kerosene and considerably cheaper, so I'm told.
My local wilderness is the practically treeless Pennines, where high level peat deposits and peat bogs serve as mute testimony to the existence of the mighty forest of the distant past. The combination of climate shift, human intervention, industrial revolution and the introduction of sheep has destroyed it. When you walk the tops, you occasionally come across roots eroding out of the peat: sad to see. In that environment alcohol stoves, paraffin stoves and gas stoves have something to offer apart from in times of drought, when the peat is tinder dry and a single spark can start a blaze which burns for weeks, when the smoke can be smelled thirty miles away and when the surrounding moors can be closed to walkers for safety and fire prevention reasons.
Give or take, my chances of collecting air dried wood for starting a small fire to make a brew -and my inclination to do that- are both zero in my present stamping ground but I can still go retro and brew up on an iconic Optimus which is sometimes, incorrectly, described as 'antique', and just be content to enjoy the moment.
I put paraffin in the tank and alcohol in the priming cup, lit the alky and while it was preheating the burner, I pricked the jet. With a pricker, obviously. When the alcohol was nearly consumed I closed the air screw in the filler cap, gave a gentle stroke on the pump and held my breath. There was a small flame at the jet, I pumped once more and there was a faint hissing roar. After several seconds more, I gave 10 pumps or so and my one pint wonder sprang into roaring life and I was transported back over 50 years by the sound and smell of the one-time world's most popular camping stove. It was wonderful: nostalgia is powerful stuff.
I boiled water and made coffee, a happy bunny. Ok, it's heavier than modern stoves but to offset that, a full tank will serve for a weekend at least and paraffin / kerosene is a safer and less volatile fuel than unleaded gasoline or alcohol. True, you need alcohol to prime the thing but the alcohol used to make a brew or two in an alcohol stove would be sufficient for a week's priming duties. Additionally, if you need a bigger, hotter flame, just pump it up. If you want a low simmer, bleed some of the tank air out until you have the flame you want; these things are controllable. And if the flame gets blown out, you can relight it just like a gas stove if you don't delay too much.
The days when you could buy paraffin from a pump at the petrol station are long gone but you can still buy it at garden centres and B&Q, who sell it for fuelling greenhouse heaters. You can also run them on 28sec central heating oil, which is close to kerosene and considerably cheaper, so I'm told.
My local wilderness is the practically treeless Pennines, where high level peat deposits and peat bogs serve as mute testimony to the existence of the mighty forest of the distant past. The combination of climate shift, human intervention, industrial revolution and the introduction of sheep has destroyed it. When you walk the tops, you occasionally come across roots eroding out of the peat: sad to see. In that environment alcohol stoves, paraffin stoves and gas stoves have something to offer apart from in times of drought, when the peat is tinder dry and a single spark can start a blaze which burns for weeks, when the smoke can be smelled thirty miles away and when the surrounding moors can be closed to walkers for safety and fire prevention reasons.
Give or take, my chances of collecting air dried wood for starting a small fire to make a brew -and my inclination to do that- are both zero in my present stamping ground but I can still go retro and brew up on an iconic Optimus which is sometimes, incorrectly, described as 'antique', and just be content to enjoy the moment.
