I never bought any of Tinny's stoves. They were always high priced, and designed for a very narrow niche.
Yeah, I know, I know..."for the insane" (After 40 years, I'm rereading Steppenwolf, and I think that's in there: "MAGIC THEATER ENTRANCE - NOT FOR EVERYBODY - For Madmen ONLY!")
But I
did buy them, and now they are mostly, except for 1 M2 model and the one-off prototype I bought, which I found good enough to actually take on a trip with me a few years ago, and at least one "white box style" stove, which Tinny named the BIOS 2-4 (he doesn't make them anymore, having reduced the BIOS model to just the #6, which is a "pressurized" version) pretty much in boxes in my "gear room", which is one entire bedroom in the back of the house. (I really need to clean, reorganize, and finish the shelving I started about 5 or 6 years ago...)
At one point in my life in the past 10 years (maybe that's more like 15 years!), if Tinny made it, I bought it. I have everything from his "hockey puck" stove with carbon felt to the "Atomic" and "Mini Atomic", as well as a few "Elite" stoves he made from Starbucks Double Shot drink cans - something he drinks all the time because he's diabetic.
Now it has been over ten years since I have used a backpacking stove, and I really see no need for any in the future. It is still fun to keep up with the latest DIY designs though.
The MBD prototype. Note that the legs were inserted as straight rods, then shaped, unlike the other M2 through M6 designs, which required that each leg (and potstand leg) be inserted into holes in the base. On this model, the legs fold in, so the overall size isn't nearly as large as you might think. Tinny probably found the design really hard to make in any quantity because of the difficulty of doing the legs, and he told me (in an email) that he thought this particular model "burned too hot". I've found it to be just right, at least for my style of "boil and eat" most of the time and occasional "real cooking", and the flame control is really handy. I don't know how much fuel I actually save, because, if you use one of his old "chicken waterer" fuel feeders (of which I probably have about a dozen) instead of the flexible Platypus I was experimenting with in the case of this photo, you lose a bit removing the "chicken waterer" feeder from the fuel line. These stoves, as I'm sure you know if you attempted several copies yourself, required very exacting attention to tolerances and spacing.
I have way too many stoves, including a half dozen
Brasslite models, both single and double wall, and even a (no longer extant) Packafeather Featherfire adjustable. For a while, I thought the (far too delicate) Featherfire style stove was going to made again by
Taos Stoves, but that hasn't materialized. I strongly suspect that, except for "stove crazies" like myself, there isn't much of a market for these little "too delicate" stoves, which essentially take something simple and add back in all the stuff that alcohol stoves were supposed to be getting us away from in the first place. Better to stick to cat stoves and white boxes. You can still burn down the house, but the stove will survive the holocaust to be used again. (Or replaced with yet another.)
My "old" alcohol kit in all its glory. I have to admit that I lost this entire kit somehow. It's buried somewhere, or, after I put it in the bottom of the pantry so I could use it daily for breakfast some 4 or 5 years ago, the wife mistook it for garbage (it was wrapped in a Reflectix cozy) and threw it out.
Note the "simmer option" ceramic bunsen burner mesh screen, which can still be acquired at
Amazon (and other places). Admittedly, most of the stuff you see here didn't actually "travel" - this was my "backyard" kit, so there was a lot of extra stuff here - 2 Bics, small and regular, and multiple pots and stoves. The .5L Platypus was something I was trying at the time of this photo (circa 2008) in order to avoid the "back pressure" problems of feeding the remote feed stove with a bottle. If you used a bottle to feed the stove, you had to be careful to not release the sides before "venting". If you didn't, the pressure of the indented bottle sides would just suck the fuel you just sent to the stove right back into the bottle. Tinny labored long and hard over this problem (and others) with various caps with vents and such (all of which I have copies, of course - I have never had more sense than $$$, which means I don't have the $$$ either), before he pretty much gave up the attempts.
Cooking scrambled eggs on the M5 (modified) on my (handleless) MSR Blacklight Teflon pan (no longer made). The mushrooms you see in this photo were also an experiment of sorts: I was playing with the idea of adding mushrooms to my kit (at the time) by using dried packets (which you can easily find at the grocery) and reconstituting them just prior by soaking them in warm/tepid water for a few minutes. I love mushrooms; the experiment worked well enough, but it really just added yet another step to cooking and made a bit more mess, as well as taking time and extra water (which you
had to reuse - but where do you store it? Do you boil "mushroom soak" water and make coffee? :^})
Yes, it's madness. It's disease. But it's a lot of fun.
We have to be obsessed about something, I guess. Making (and collecting) alcohol stoves is better than many other obsessions (and addictions).
ETA: I forgot to add to all that above, that my memory failed me on at least one (probably more - check me on this) point in my previous post. The M6 was named the "Moodoo" (after the composted cow manure fertilizer Tinny's wife used in her garden), not the "Voodoo", which name actually referred to a prior model (which, strangely, I
don't have). The name was
originally "Voodoo", but Tinny changed it to avoid confusion with the earlier version,
which apparently didn't work with some people, as you can see.
A video of the M6 "Moodoo" stove. This video has much better shots of the stove, and the "crazy" who shot the review video is using the modified potstand posts.
