Wicks for priming cups

I use meths (spirit/alcohol) to prime my Kero stoves and lamps, but it has a tendency to boil and spit out little drops of burning meths.

To get around this I recently made wicks for all my stoves.

Obviously you can't use normal rope for this, you need heat proof rope. I bought one metre of 8mm door rope from my local wood stove shop for £1.50.

As soon as you get the rope, you need to prevent the rope from fraying at the ends. I found that the best thing to use is copper wire stripped out of electrical cable:



Then, measure out the length you need, wrap two, tight, copper wire bands with a gap in between and cut between them:



Keep going in the same manner until you've made wicks for all your stoves. A nice easy task for a wet Sunday afternoon.

Brit Army No12:



Primus 71:



Svea 123:



Primus N05:



Best wishes,
Terry

 

looks very nice mate.
Si

 

Much neater than the fibre glass cloth I just tie around the burner base.

 

Another example of classic improvisation. Nice Terry. Steve.

 

Got some the other day & tried it on the 1925 primus fettle in the spirit cup "SUPERB" 8) well thought out idea , thanks & shall be using it on a lot more stoves , blowlamps etc

Stu

 

Great idea i have noticed the spirit spitting when it comes to the boil when primeing my stoves and blowlamps,not a great problem but it does stain a polished and even laqured tank,useing the wick will prevent that and have a more controlled primeing flame,i would also imagine the primeing flame would last a bit longer with the wick giving a better prime.
I rember my great uncle( my grandmothers brother)who was a old school plumber having a old monitor blowlamp which i was fascinated with well to be honest i was obssesed with blowlamps as a kid back in the 1970's,which is what has drove me to collecting and loving blowlamps stoves and pressure lanterns,i rember him fireing it up several times, and them old tradesman never used meths spirit to prime there lamps what he used to do was put some tissue paper in the well/spirit cup to act as a wick and use some paraffin from the tank to prime it,works just as well but does smoke and leave a black sooted burner

 

Adopted !

 

Of course you can see why it was never original equipment when the marketing department found out what the engineers wanted to do.

So you want to add a wick to our new Wickless stove design?

 

Nice job TD

Ron

 

Hi
I use this method more with the small petrol stoves, SVEA 123, Radius 42 etc. over kill for anything larger than a 96 IMHO.
One word of warning though, be careful of loose fibres as Terry says bind the ends tightly with wire or melt with a blow torch.
If you think this is over kill ask the american guy who spent a night in the eye infirmary after a stray fibre found it's way into his cornea.
He was making lightweight alcohol stoves but it's the same process.
Problems with loose fibres is one of the reasons carbon felt has taken over as the wick of choice with the ultralight alcohol stove brigade.

 

That's why I use these one's



The felt is heatproof to 1000deg yet holds the alcohol from slushing around.

Ron

 

Never heard of carbon felt before. What is it generally used for (aside from priming wicks)?

Yonadav

 

That is a great idea. I really like how nice and clean it looks on the Svea 123. I am going to give this method a try because for a pre heat function it should be a lot better and safer I would think. Thank you so much for sharing your idea.