Having talked about these recently on here, I spotted one on that marketplace and won it for the maiden bid! How lucky was that? It did look like a meerkat in the thumbnails, but for other, more design reasons, I have decided to call it Oleg. Pleased to see that it was complete with the travel cap and prickers and very sooty and generally dirty. Gave it a bit of a clean up and replaced the leather, the filler and travel cap gaskets and a lead washer under the burner tube. My NRV tool seemed too small to service the NRV, so that will have to wait. It faultered into life and eventually burned OK. Looking at Trojandog's excellent aging article, this one is definitely from the 1950's
What's the scale? Looks like it's size-comparible to Primus 71, Optimus 80, or Brit Military N0.7, but a kerosene burner. Most kerosene [paraffin] stoves are slightly larger than the naptha models.
@presscall @ROBBO55 Thank you, you're too kind. Just got the worst of the carbon off using household cleaners, but plenty more to go! Autosol did a good job on the ally front - then I got bored. @SveaSizzler This is a half pint kerosene stove with lipstick burner, like the Primus/Optimus 96s. Same basic parts as the Monitor 17B - but that one had legs. The box for this is slightly over 5 inches square and 6 1/4 inches high. Positively gargantuan in comparison with my Radius 42. which is 4 inches deep by 3 5/8 wide and 5 1/2 inches high, while the No.7 is broadly the same size as the Radius.. Allowing for the curve at the back of the Radius tin, the cubic capacity of the Monitor box is about twice that of the Radius. You would need big pockets!
Thanks for the clarification. Truly a neat stove. Were there ever any paraffin/kerosene stoves the same size as a Svea 123? Not philosophically opposed to kerosene stoves, personally, but none have fallen off a Kerosenestove Palm and hit me in the head as yet.
@SveaSizzler Well, I cannot think of anything smaller than a half pint, but then I don't get out much! The kero stoves need a pump, so that is one limitation as to compact size, unless you had an external one, and they might need more vaporizing, too. If you are looking for something kero to fall from a tree, might I suggest you refine your search to something branded Droptimus?
I think that in my neighbourhood if a kerosene stove dropped from a tree, I'd worry about one of these: Drop Bear
While a coconut tried to kill me about 30 years ago in Antigua, the near miss did not put me off coconuts or coconut milk. As for the Drop Bears, if wearing a jar of Vegamite on a thong about the neck will repel them, I'm a goner. [Tried the stuff and Drop Bears are preferred] Thankfully there are no Kero-palms in Arizona. Palm trees are not native, but in PHX and Tucson, a lot of landscapers have planted them over the last 50 years. I'm more likely to be torn to shreds by a pack of peyotl-crazed Jackalopes, or savaged by the odd Chupacabra, but the latter only operate under a Full Moon. John's Lamb stove is fascinating, but I have no such mad machining skills. The upturn in evilbay campstove pricing occurred just as I came to grips with my Stove Pox Addiction about 6 years ago. The era of affordable Kero burners is now past. Also in North America they are a rarity. I grew up with Colemans [dual burners and lanterns] in Scouts, and started packing a Svea 123 as a 20-year-old, but the larger Primus and Optimus kerosene burners are foreign and exotic. I remember their inclusion in REI catalogs of the day, but only a group outfitting for a foreign expedition would have considered them. Coleman gas-burners ruled the interior.
Pretty much the same in my time; probably a little earlier as we didn't use stoves in the backcountry-- cooked on fires. Which made my exception all the more unusual: the Optimus 45 my folks gave me in the early 1960s, which I once carried 50 miles on the Wonderland Trail. It was unique, and gave me some status. I never asked my dad how they came to pick it out as a present for me back then, or where they got it. I suspect REI, of which my dad was a member from the early 1950s.
