Hobo Rocket Stove

Like London buses, so with my blog posts: None turn up for ages than you get two in a row.  But I just wanted to share this little project with you, that we did yesterday: a hobo rocket stove.  It is simplicity in itself.  This is how we did it:

1. We took a dog food tin kindly donated by Eddie, the Beagle and cut open the bottom end as well as the top end (removing the dog food of course, which was appreciatively gulped down by said beagle). 
2. We took a 5litre olive oil can which we got from our recent trip to Greece and emptied it's contents into other containers.
3. Wearing heavy duty gloves (!) and using a simple tin opener off my multi-tool implement, we cut a hole the size of the dog food tin in the narrow side, near the bottom and stuck said tin about halfway inside.
4. Still wearing said gloves and using the same tool, we then proceeded to cut another hole in the top, a bit larger than the other hole.
5. Next we stuffed a little straw into Eddies tin, top by a few small dry twigs.

 Finally the test: we lit the straw with a standard cigarette lighter, although matches may also have performed the same job and put a small saucepan with approximately 1/2 litre of water on top.

I set a stopwatch from the moment we lit the fire and kept feeding it with small twigs.  All in all just a small handful was used and within a mere 11 minutes the water was boiling!

And this picture perfectly demonstrates why it works so well and why they call it a rocket stove:

The fire literally rockets out of the back of the small tin and then upwards, creating a lot of heat very quickly.  This will makes us our daily coffee at least now and save us on camping gas from non-renewable containers.

So now we're cooking hobo style: