As always, I stripped a new (to me) stove down to its component parts It was not in the best of condition. You can see some dents and dings in the brass tank and that photo's after I'd cleaned the parts and rinsed and dried off the rusted steel components out of the electrolyte bath. The wick too is one I made. There was no wick in the stove when I got it, just this rusted core I made a new core by taking a couple of lengths of galvanised steel garden tie wire and slowly twisting them together using a hand drill on the slowest speed Next was the wick itself, which had to be of a scorch-proof fibre. The original, from what traces remained in the wick tube and tested in a flame, was fibreglass. Well, I'd just bought myself a new soldering mat, which is made of woven fibreglass strands. I guess taking some out of it still leaves me a heck of a lot of material for more projects needing this sort of wick - or I may use what remains as a soldering mat still The other essential was something to bind the fibre strands to the twisted wire armature. Among my stash of materials I'll find a use for but maybe can't right now was the fine brass wire from the decorative net that a bottle of Rioja is encased in. Brass wire through-and-through and not just brass plated I'd noticed when I stripped it off the bottle. The cork made a handy storage bobbin. Pretty good Rioja as I recall too Here are the new wick bindings. At the stove burner end, equipped with a loop to hook the wick out when necessary ... ... and the other end nearest the fuel tank Here's the replacement wick alongside the remains of the old one Ready to install. That hook device is an installation/extraction tool I made out of the same garden tie wire as was used for the wick core ... TO BE CONTINUED John
Hey John, great idea on how to fabricate the twisted wire. Will keep that in mind when I finally get to remove the original on my 325. Cheers Ron
Wick installation, tucked in to a point just beyond the burner orifice/valve exit tube Wick tube screw cap in place Moving on to the tank screw cap. It comes apart to reveal a type of safety release valve that I can only assume is there to vent the tank if too much vapour pressure builds up when the stove's in transit on a hot day In use, the tank is vented anyway by unscrewing the cap just enough to expose the vent hole The hinge joint is well engineered. It allows the fuel tank to be raised from stowage position to upright, in use, but stays fuel-tight. The screw adjuster can be torqued down using the spigot on the handle end of the fuel control valve handle. Doesn't need to be massively tight, just enough to allow free movement of the joint and maintain the seal ... TO BE CONTINUED John
The burner, installed in the burner tray. A washer and nut secures it on the underside of the tray That's got to be one of the cleverest sets of flip-up pan supports in stovedom, especially since they're held in place simply by the burner tray being inserted in the base pan The final assembly is to fix this part of the casing on the stove fuel feed pipes ... ... which carry a clip for stowage of the fuel control handle TO BE CONTINUED John
WOW, You've done it again presscall! Makes me want to keep my eye open for a Turm, but I've already got enough stoves . Some of the refurb projects that you and several members have put together deserve their own topic/location on the site. It would be a great sub catagorie within the fettling forum. Like a Hayes or Chilton's shop manual for stoves? Great work and photo shoot, AR
Wow! Another "Perfect Post", John! Absolutely superlative! Would you mind sharing a bit about your photo technique? Camera, backdrop material, lighting, what have you. I really love the look of your posts. Thanks for sharing the pics of your work. Best, Gary
Howdy, Presscall, Yet another outstanding tutorial, Mate!! Well done, and your photos are first cabin, too!! I like those Turm stoves, and think that they are very nice, indeed, and well worth seeking out and acquiring. Quiet, capable, and neat. What's not to like?!! 8) Thanks, John, for another home run post!! Take care, and God Bless! Every Good Wish, Doc
A very underestimated range of little stoves.. Very nice John, Go on paint it RED !! I have not seen that type of safety valve on a Turm stove before .
Thanks all! I wholly agree with the opinions, Doc, Andrew, about the capabilities of Turm stoves. I've been using mine pretty much constantly for brews and to cook a meal (French Onion Soup) since the fettle. It sits on a heat-proof pad on a kitchen worktop (counter? - USA) and it's a silent, efficient little marvel. I'm not sure whether the Turm Tourist was intended for outdoors or to use in travel lodgings, like a travel clothes iron might be, but I'll certainly be giving it a go outdoors, with suitable windshielding. RED Andrew? I'd got maroon in mind, a bit like the font colour of an older type of Vapalux lantern, or an AGM 'Speedmaster-type' stove font. The burner tray needs to be a stove black for the heat, obviously, (could be silver I suppose, but that'd maybe be garish) and the stove lower casing gets pretty hot in use, so I'll have to give a thought to how that'll work out with my intended colour paint. I'm looking out too for some suitable 'Letraset'-type stencil lettering font to restore the nameplate. That valve? Isn't that a feature on all Turms then? It's a thin-walled fuel tank, so I suppose my theory that it's to release vapour pressure to stop it bulging if the tank gets hot when sealed for travel isn't so fanciful. Easy! Camera's a Pentax 'Optio' digital compact with a 3X optical zoom. Must be four years old I guess, so Pentax have probably moved on a couple of models or more by now. I still have all the gear (SLR's, lenses) for 35mm and 120 roll film but have never made the conversion to digital other than with the little Pentax. Evidently it works fine. It has a 'macro' setting and I use that a lot. Lighting Pretty much all of the photos for my posts were taken on a kitchen worktop (counter) using a combination of fluorescent tube lighting (underside of row of kitchen cabinets above the worktop) and tungsten room lighting. I don't use the flash on the camera (apart from using it to 'freeze' the action of boiling water), so set the camera on a floor-standing tripod or a mini-tripod on the worktop/counter to cope with long-ish shutter speeds that would blur the image if the camera were used hand-held. Why do I not use flash? Short of a studio bounced flash set-up, which would work fine, the little flash on the Pentax gives harsh black shadows - flash of that sort 'on camera' always does. Tends to bleach out the detail and doesn't look so good as shadowless (or near shadowless) lighting. Natural light on an overcast day is the best there is for a lot of photography - the clouds act as giant light diffusers - and the set-up I use in the kitchen is the best I can manage that reproduces that effect. Colour balance seems not to be an issue. With film stock, fluorescent tube lighting would produce a green colour cast, tungsten a red/orange one without the use of correcting filters on the lens. The mixture of lighting I use seems to produce a neutral tone, helped by the electronics of the Pentax to produce a decent white balance. Most modern cameras will do that, it's not a unique feature of the Pentax. Backdrop's art board, thin enough to take a curve between worktop and wall at the back of the worktop so the stove or stove parts sit on the board and there's a seamless backdrop beyond them. I've trialled coloured art board, but it's not worked and it gives a colour cast the camera can't cope with so well, so have settled on grey, the latest being a metallic-finish satin silver. You'll notice the 'wear and tear' on some of the backdrops, which indicates that I try to make them last as long as I decently can. Not being cheapskate, just don't get to the art shop too often for replacements! Why a backdrop? You don't get the best photos with a load of unrelated clutter or detail in them. The viewer wants to see the subject and nothing else. Patterned wallpaper, unrelated objects in shot amount to 'clutter' and a backdrop paper prevents that. That said, the frame edges of the actual photos I take prior to cropping them in the uploading software often show 'beyond the backdrop' clutter, so that gets cropped out. Simple. Photographing flames like this one on the Turm ... ... is done by half-depressing the shutter button (to focus the camera) while the worktop/counter lights are on, then since the light switch is near enough, I can keep holding the shutter button and switch the lights out with the other hand. Reason I do this is that the camera seems not to be too keen on focusing in low light levels. The camera (on a tripod of course) takes care of the exposure in real-time, and handles it well. Composition requires a bit of thought, but I try to get the parts like the Turm's ... ... as much arranged like an 'exploded view' as I can make it, meaning somewhere in context of what fits where when assembled. Sometimes it's necessary to use little blobs of 'Blue-Tak' (USA equivalent is what?) which is a clay-like substance used instead of pins to hold posters on walls, to stop round parts from rolling out of position, or get things like that Turm tank filler cap ... ... to stay in the position I want them to. Without Blu-Tak in that example, the valve component would have tipped down and not be cantilevered out in the way I wanted to emphasise the valve. Looking at that pic again, I don't think I got the Blu-Tak quite out of shot! Hey, I'm no expert photographer, but work with a professional and have watched what he does and asked questions. He's often said that though he uses top-of-the-range digital Canon SLR's and Hasselblads + lenses he could manage most of what he does with the Pentax I use. Occasionally, though, there are tasks that the Pentax couldn't manage, and he finds an eyepiece viewfinder - which he's used to from his film cameras - something he's lost without. Hope that helps, Gary. All the best, John
Hi John, Great restoration again, and a great photo tutorial - thanks. I too like this style of meths stove. I regularly use them for perking coffee as they have a more gentle type of heat than kero or coleman fuel type stoves (even with the latter turned down to simmer), and I find the coffee just seems to come out better with a slower approach. Cheers, Graham.
Hi John Great photos and helpful tips. You have obviously got quality optics on your Pentax, and that what really matters. Best Regards, Kerophile.
Hi all, John, great work again ! Love the meths stoves of this kind - elegant and more powerful than the gentle flame appears on these non-pressurized systems. I use my Turm and all my other meths stoves for cooking rice as these stove can not only give a high heat when called on ,but will do a nice medium heat and then go low for a true simmer, that rice calls for . Again wonder pics/essay/ tutorial Tom
My explanation of how I take photos for CCS posts got a bit wordy, so I thought I'd best show some photos to illustrate. Here's a shot of the Rioja I favour at the moment, particularly since it's wrapping net provides that useful fine brass wire. Never know when I've gotta have some more ... wire, that is Here's the set-up for that photo. I prefer grey art board but I had some blue in stock so I thought I'd give that a go. It forms a base and back-drop by curving it upwards, holding it in place with a couple of doorstops (only one shows in the photo). The fluorescent tubes under the wall cabinets are lit and the room lights (halogen and tungsten) are lit too. No flash used on the camera Here's a shot of the Turm with a Sirram Boiling Set kettle and a two-cup Festival of Britain (1951) teapot by Swan Set-up for taking that photo. Same as for the bottle Now for a close-up photo. I chose the lid of the Festival of Britain teapot with the distinctive Britannia logo of the FoB Festival of Britain logo This is how I took that photo ... same thing in close-up Ok, you ask, what camera are you using to take photos of your camera taking photos? I've got two, like I've got two Primus 210's, one a user, one for back-up, one Audi gearbox, one for back-up, one Mazda air meter, one for back-up ... John
Simple and easy but your lighting came with the house and mine didn't. I have to wonder though, do you wear both suspenders (gallouses?) and a belt? Bob
Braces and a belt, Bob? No, it's just machinery/electronics I like to have back-up for! Fair point about the lighting set-up, but an alternative would be either a purchased 'light tent' such as in this example ... Light tent ... or by making something up with white cotton sheet draped over a wire or wooden frame to diffuse the light of a couple of halogen table lamp spotlights set on either side and slightly above the 'tent'. John
Hi John, I am always very impressed by the high quality of your photographs, but also the time you take to compose the picture. I was under the impression that you were using a Pro semi Pro equipment using perhaps a light box. Now finding you are using a compact digital camera I am gob smacked ............ Brilliant! Tripod use is key to good sharp photos even in good light conditions as you always prove. Excellent photo tutorial. Thank you . Cheers Tim PS Eyeballs was taken in a mirror,or do you have a secret Canon D1 you have not told us about
Hi John, Is that a Slik 88 I spy? Great tripod - wish I still had mine but it was lost in a storage warehouse fire many years ago (when we were living overseas) courtesy of "Pickfords, The Careful Movers" sic. I've got a Vivitar tripod these days but it's nowhere near as nice. You wouldn't believe it from some of the pictures I post but I've got a C&G in photography. But that was back in SLR 35mm days. Like yourself I've just got a simple digital point and shoot but have never produced brilliant results from it in terms of stove shots. Reading again through your tutorial I think I've been expecting too much from it and need to get back to basics and properly set up the shot - thanks for the advice! Cheers, Graham.
In a mirror, Tim. The 'laterally inverted' mirror writing jumble of the PENTAX was put right by the 'flip' command in the image uploading software. Yeah, I surprised myself what's possible with a digital compact! You're right about the usefulness of a tripod. It makes long shutter speeds in low light conditions possible. That little flexible-jointed gizmo (got it as a gift, but it's called a Joby 'Gorillapod') ... Joby Gorillapod ... works better than some mini-tripods I've used. It's handy too to take out-and-about as an alternative to lugging a full-sized tripod along because the legs can be wrapped around railings, branches of trees and suchlike to get the stability for a shot. Cheers, Tim. I see what you mean about the resemblance to the French stove, GoNoBro, but you're right, it's a toaster, a Dualit. They still make them so I've not stockpiled spares for it ... yet. John
