Wood stoves

tomas

A triangle shape is always more stable. I'm looking at it from a designers point of view don't forget that please. I realize that it's stable enough for the intended purpose but there is room for improvement. Whenever the emberlit is placed on a semi-flat surface (with some irregularities) one of the corners of the bottom square could get lifted, as you shift the weight on top of it while cooking, the stove might wobble a bit. This isn't a big problem but might be a bit irritating to some.

Hmm, years ago I used my Emberlit Ti stove quite a bit, cooked many longer simmer dishes on it and never found it tippy. In fact of all the owner/users of that stove I've never even heard of any tipping complaint until now.

99% of the time now we use a Whitebox alcohol stove as we find it more convenient, quicker and no cleanup or soot. We use either a 1.3L pot or a 2L pot and you would think by looking at it that if any stove would be tippy, that would be the one but again we have had zero trouble with that one either. I've used it well over a thousand times and never had a pot tip yet...knock on wood...

"Stick" doing a "top down burn" on the bushbuddy:

Absolutely *NOT* a "con". It's an advantage. You can break the twigs you need with your fingers, and you can gather your fuel easily as you walk: it doesn't take up much space.
Use a stick - yeah, you're putting them in the stove as fuel, but you don't need to do that until the door is open. Until it's on fire, the stick is called "a tool". There are other "tools" lying about as well. No need to be blind to the obvious.

I'm surprised that your list doesn't include the Sierra Zip Stove (http://www.zzstove.com/) or the BioLite (http://www.bioliteenergy.com/). Granted, these stoves add to the complication of "just a fire", but, just for the sake of comprehensiveness, you'd think an "engineering student" would have a wee bit of interest.
:^D Oh, yeah...

I have one too.

And, no, I didn't use it. I think I've played with it a bit, but I have certainly not taken it out on a trip or anything like that. I was just curious. Curiosity, I've found, is costly.

I also have a couple of "JetBoil style" stoves, including at least 1 actual JetBoil. I tried it on the patio, found that the basic "technology" involved was the heat exchanger and tight stove-pot integration, and found that, most of the time, I'm simply not all that interested in "stove speed", even though I spent a hell of a lot of time playing with a lot of stoves and even building a lot of alcohol burners in various sizes and configurations to test the effect of changes on speed of boil. For what I do, it's just too heavy and bulky. Impressive in a sort of "wow, that's amazing!" sort of way, but not anything I'd ever use. Once again, I was just curious.

What I actually found is that what's best, at least for me, is the stove that I'm most comfortable with. To this day, I still use a stove outside in the mornings or afternoons on the patio virtually every day - a different one every day - just for the hell of it. What I find is that, should I take a stove with me, I'm not at all unfamiliar with most any one I decide on. There are good points and bad for virtually all of them. I can use most any stove I have without having to think about it all that much.

I see a lot of people come here and ask the most basic questions - there's nothing wrong with that - it's why the forum exists. For myself, I tend to "buy and try" instead of asking questions. After I've tried something out a number of times, then I usually have some questions I haven't been able to work out for myself.

I have found that most of the real "nitty gritty" of "howto" and so forth is not gleaned from conversation - except for a rare accident. Most of the "helpful comments" I've gotten on this forum were of the type in which someone mentioned something I hadn't heard about - like in the current "towel discussion" - but I still had to go out and buy the stuff and check it out for myself. That's not to discount the number - relatively large - of comments on technique and skills. I still have to try them out to see if it works for me. I spent a couple of years bouncing back and forth from the "guyline knot only" to "guyline thingamajig" before I'd used both long enough and in enough varying conditions to justify a choice. I mostly use "thingamajigs" now, though I can, and still do, sometimes use a knot. Winter weather and lots of cold, ugly mud moved me from the "knot only" to the "thingamajig" crowd: knots are hard to tie in the cold, and even harder to tie and deal with in cold, rain and mud.)

Before I bought a BushBuddy, I built my own "reverse gasifier" out of a couple of different sized tins. It worked well enough, though it smoked a great deal more than the BushBuddy, and - most importantly - it wasn't remotely as robust or as light as the BushBuddy. I can't imagine how someone doing an "engineering project" on small woodburning stoves could forego actually examining, using and analyzing current designs and then building many, many models himself/herself. You can't find out the "how it works" stuff you need to come up with a workable and practical design - at least in my opinion - without doing that. Maybe the "pure designer" is never supposed to take actual designs into consideration before creating something new - just "specking it out" based on some written set of "requirements". (I'm not an engineer - not by a long shot.)

Anyway, I've rambled far too much.