Penny Alcohol Backpacking Stove Photos

I’ve long held a fascination with lightweight backpacking stoves, constructing a number of the devices from different designs based on common aluminum beverage cans. The end products are often interesting exercises in design and material reuse. A few are useful even.

None more so than Mark Jurey’s Penny Ultralight Alcohol Backpacking Stove (that link may be dead. See Mark’s page via Archive.org if that is the case.). Not only does Jurey’s contraption use discarded beer cans and bits of coat hanger but also a single American penny, an odd and nearly worthless contrivance on its own.

The stoves are a joy use and construct. I’ve made close to a dozen in all, I suppose, and have put them to use in car camping as well as backcountry excursions, giving away others to unsuspecting, sometimes baffled recipients. To build your own, check out Jurey’s website for construction details (Archive.org).