The coke can multi-fuel stove. Upcycling rubbish to, well, something that is also rubbish.

Surfing the web, bit bored, I was looking at cycling blogs. On one of them they had an image of some guy making a beer can stove. Well that looks interesting, I'll give it a go. Got home, fished a coke can out of the skip, removed the inner top where the ring pull is, cut it in half, put some grooves in the side of the top, inserted top into bottom, het presto! A coke can stove.


I'll not say that it works brilliantly, indeed boiling up an expresso it was silly slow. I'm guessing a beer can would give a bigger flame. It is also an oddly unimpressive thing to make, verging on dangerous. One suspects a shop bought item - let's call it "proper" for the sake of argument - would only be a few pounds anyway, so here not much money is being saved. My builder's took the piss, my wife gave me a sideways look and my children shrugged their shoulders. Still I've made one and entered the world of Geek. Long may the geeks reign.

....and if ever I'm stuck on a desert island with nowt but an old can, lighter and some meths, well you can bugger off! I'm a cookin' while you're a suffrin!

On reflection, having made a little stove, I now realise that the task makes one not clever, but something else. A twat perhaps? Yes, that's it; I'm a twat. But Dear reader you knew that anyway didn't you?

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