I like that there's this old "stuff" section now. I got LOADS of that (they just find me). Unfortinatly I havn't always taken pictures of my projects, but We'll start with this one. So I regret not having any "before" pictures, but this is the mother of all white gas camp stoves. The story starts about 6-7 years ago when we were renting an old building in town for storage for our machine shop. Alot of it was just excess tools and inventory we had aquired (considering we merged 3 machine shops together) that needed to be sorted out, condensed, scraped, etc. so I put in a lot of evenings driving our forklift between there and our main facility. The building was kinda cool as it had been built as a railroad shed originally and had most recently been a car repair shop before we filled it up with our own junk. While clearing it out we found some cool stuff (where I got my Sun 200 tune-up station), but in one corner there was a closet that you could ONLY get to via extension ladder or fork lift. Up there was packed with garbage..... from the 30's. I'm confident it hadn't been touched since pre WW2 and it really was junk in the sense that it all would have been abandoned by previous building occupants, but given the age, it had now moved into the realm of treasure. There was a stack a school books that had been singed by fire but were still readable, decomposing Model T tires. A bunch of small bits from mid 30's Chevys, a hot water heater, 2 complete pick-up stake side sets, union carbide cans, old oil cans, gramophone parts.... just lots of good 'garbage'. This stove came out of there. It had some surface rust but underneith was black that had been repainted green at some point. It was complete with the exception of the front range knobs, and there wasn't much by way of damage. I took it apart and repainted it flat high-temp black and did the burner manifold in high-temp clear laquer. It works the same as your typical Coleman gas stove, but everything is much better built. The fuel tank holds about 1 gallon and has a built in pressure gauge. It had some crusty dried fuel in the bottom but was rust free. The pump is not integrated into the tank but is bolted to the side of the sheet metal shell and connected by copper pipe. It's all brass with a wood handle and leather seal inside. The old seal still worked for a little bit but tore so was replaced. The tank has a primary needle valve to limit the fuel vapor before to travels up to the generator via copper pipe. I tried to save the old generator but it had rusted inside and broke when I was trying to take it appart. Luckily I found a similar one on Ebay that fit with the help of an adaptor sleeve. The generator isn't heated over one of the ranges but has it's own porclain burner jets. The ranges, burners, and the manifold that connects them are all cast iron and either are assembled with tight fitting pipe threads, or a couple places are welded solidly together. I restored it earlier this summer. I could not find ANY evidence of its existance online. No pictures, parts, 100 year old google books, nothing, not even a similar model. Once everything was cleaned, pollished, painted, and/or replaced. It fired right up and puts out some serious heat! Of course it has the "charm" of needing to be pumped up every 5 minutes, but it's not too dificult to use. We drove up to Yellowstone in July and took it with us and it was nice being able to cook a full griddle of pancakes while also cooking a large pan of eggs. It was worth the size it took up (aprox. 30" x 14" x 24" and weighs 20lbs.) and is way fun to use. I know there are safety concerns with these old gas stoves, but like so many other things, it was good to KNOW the condition of the parts given I had put them together with my own hands, and this one is so over-built that there isn't the same risk of tin parts rusting through or falling appart (in my obviously biased opinion). These are pics I took right before the last parts went on.
The Jalopy Journal
