So, I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but I do not own a car right now. I've been car free since the middle of April, and I've started to really enjoy it in the last month or two. I bought a cheap Walmart bike because that was all I could afford. Because I was using it as my transportation, I rode it into the ground in just a month or two. So I turned it back in and got another Walmart bike, this time with included rack and fenders and 21 speeds instead of just 7. It could go twice as fast and I could stop wearing my backpack which made me so sweaty and tired. Alas, it is still a Walmart bike. I got my first clues today that I might have started to ride this one to the ground already as well. Oh well. My next bike will hopefully be a good one from a real bike shop meant to and able to handle the abuse, and have quality parts actually capable of being properly adjusted and maintained. But that's a whole different rant. They are serving their purpose just fine, and if I wasn't riding them about 20 miles every day, then they probably would last at least a year with minimal protest.
I've liked using my bike to get me around so much, and I'm so cheap, that I've started fantasizing about long term traveling by bike (bike touring). Not having to pay rent, car payments or gas, airfare, water or electricity bills, etc sounds good to me. Why can't I live off my bike and go where ever I feel like it whenever I feel like it? It started out as a crazy idea, but it became more serious the more I researched it and read the blogs of people who were doing it. I made a list of everything I would need. I searched for the cheapest smallest tents, sleeping bags, etc. Anyway, somewhere along the way I found a tutorial for making a super small, super light camp stove using two soda cans. I don't drink soda, but there are tons of soda and beer cans littering the roadsides here. So I picked some up on one of my rides, and made a stove.
My first attempt is with an interior wall and a big hole in the center:
Being the first one I made, it understandably is not as nice as I would have liked. It was a learning process. A hammer was involved to make the two halves fit together. It took me about an hour.
My second one though, is much better in my opinion, and it took about half the time. I decided to try the "penny stove" design, which does not have an interior sidewall and only a little hole in the middle as opposed to cutting off the whole bottom. It's a pressure stove: you put a penny over the hole and if the pressure gets to be too great the penny will flap around, ideally preventing explosive pressures from building up.
I have not had the chance to test either of these stoves out yet, and probably will not in the near future either. They are indeed very tiny and lightweight and, assuming they work, would be ideal for inclusion in my pack for touring, if I ever get up the guts to do it.
Here are some links to tutorials. There seems to be at least a dozen or so variations.
http://www.thesodacanstove.com/stove/
http://ygingras.net/b/2007/6/a-better-soda-can-stove
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