The Story of Cool Little Miniature Stove
Cool Little Miniature Stove is our second most popular PR video on Metacafe. If you haven’t seen the video, basically it’s a how-to that explains how to make a small & lightweight alcohol stove from a couple of soda cans:
I’ve actually known about this type of stove for quite a long time. I used them backpacking in my preteen days. I was looking for something else on the web one day when I ran across a Penny Stove. It jogged my memory of the alcohol stove from so many years ago, so I decided to create a how-to video on the process.
There are many different ways to make the alcohol stove, but I decided to show the easiest one. The can I show in the video is not the most efficient, but it is the easiest to make with items you probably already have laying around your house: soda cans, razor blade, coat hangar, thumbtack, sandpaper, fiberglass insulation (cotton balls work too), and Heet (common fuel additive in the US).
A note regarding substitutes for Heet - Heet is basically methanol, which burns hot and clean. You can also use 97% isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol), but it burns dirty, or denatured alcohol (find it at the paint store) for a great burn.
The Digg crowd loved the stove video. It was dugg over 1500 times, and commented on over 270. I was in awe. This was a video that I pretty much threw together in an hour or so. The reaction over at Instructables were about the same. I had no idea how much people would like it.
Except for one guy on Metacafe. He released a similar video a few hours before mine. I found some nasty comments in my profile and on the video, claiming I stole his idea. He was really mad about it, too. I felt kind of bad for the guy, but to be completely honest, his video wasn’t done very well. It never had a fighting chance of maintaining the 3.0 rating in order to qualify for Producer Rewards anyway.
Behind the scenes:
While making the video, I accidentally spilled some Heet on our brand new kitchen table. If you look carefully at about 75 seconds you can see the Heet drip around the side and under the stove. From there it dripped on the table.
Since I was filming at the time, I didn’t clean it up right away. One thing about petroleum based fluids that I know so well is their ability to remove paint, glue, oil, oh and stain on your brand new kitchen table! That little mistake was even more painful when my wife came home and saw the damage.
Luckily, the video was a viral hit. The money it’s made so far would pay for several tables, so I’m off the hook.
Another funny thing happened during the making of Cool Little Miniature Stove. We had to go the grocery store to pick up soda cans for the video, since we don’t usually drink it. We settled on Root Beer, and then grabbed some vanilla ice cream so we could make some floats.
Unfortunately, the 6-pack I grabbed from the high shelf had a can that was loose. When I grabbed it, the loose can blazed toward the ground like a scud missile (bad aim), exploding everywhere and spraying us up to the neck. My wife was so shocked, all she could finally sputter was “Look, it’s on my foot!” Her foot was covered as were her jeans and several large brown blotches on her t-shirt. She looked like she had wandered under a pterodactyl with diarrhea.
It’s too bad nobody was filming that.
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