on target shooter nz: Shut-Down Life Is Like A Smoked Spam Sandwich:

Wednesday 6 May 2020

Shut-Down Life Is Like A Smoked Spam Sandwich:

When you eat a Spam sandwich .. you know that while it tastes something like a ham sandwich ... you're really being ripped-off - because this meat was made from mushed-up leftover scrappy bits of pig with lots of salt'n'stuff added to glue it all together.

The mustard you add is also a bit of a life-choice ... you can use the REAL STUFF - strong flavoured hot English Mustard thinly spread - or you can squirt runny baby diarrhoea American Mustard a quarter of an inch thick from a plastic bottle onto every surface and wonder why it still tastes like shit.

- I'm a bit of a "BE PREPARED" & "belt and braces" type .. sort of semi-serious but also for fun..

When the BIG Southern Alpine Fault earthquake lets go with it's serious shape-changing efforts .. the left-over survivors from Covid-19 will get to experiment with providing their own light, heat, shelter, food, water, security & weather proofing for months - gawd help 'em if they were originally all electric.

Would you believe that when New Zealand relaxed our "Lock-Down" regulations from level 4 to level 3 - people were reported as queuing for hours in the night outside McDonald's for them to reopen & again offer 'Big-Macs-with-cheese' .. perhaps they hadn't eaten much for some weeks?

Whatever - I've got two "Kiwi thermettes" for brewing cuppas, - a gas barbecue, - a two-burner gas camping stove, - two solid fuel HEXAMINE stoves, - a meths burner, - a living room log-burner with a cook-top - a garden brazier .. and now a stainless steel Arnaud Kombuis rocket stove:

Arnaud Rocket Stove:

It burns twigs & then all packs away into the cook-pot:

Looking forward to the drought condition FIRE BAN to also come-off so that I can play at being "Outdoors Man" on a fine day ... but what has tickled-my-fancy is that I've discovered that my old Italian Moka Express stove-top Coffee Pot fits perfectly on top of the rocket stove - it's base being almost exactly the same size as the Arnaud 1 litre pot ... Yippee - this is going to be fun eh.

I do enjoy a strong sweet-milky cup of REAL Coffee several times a day

.. mostly from a "French Press" but the Italian way is good too.

- Running my own limited fuel-efficiency tests on this gear - it took 38 smokey minutes of poking in twiggy bits to produce a 'Moka' coffee outdoors .. but next I had my ancient copper kettle steaming in just 32 minutes while I slurped at the coffee .. Great fun if - like me - you prefer your clean(ish) clothing wood-smoked rather than laundered.

I was kinda expecting the rocket-stove to roar like a Boeing .. but it seemed content to wave the occasional flame in any old direction - maybe my twiggy stuff was short of therms ?

I Couldn't Afford A Proper Titanium 'FIREBOX' Unit Like This One

- So I Bush-Bodged One ..

If you don't have any left-over perforated metal .. you could build a hobo-stove from a large can or even bend a six inch strip of corrugated roofing steel into a circle and perforate it on your rifle range - once they re-open. A better idea might be to cut a length of stainless steel flue-pipe & fit a grate?