by JaggedEdges » Wed May 04, 2016 7:07 am
Test ran my perc pot alcohol fired "coffee appliance" yesterday... have several issues to solve...
First off, test runs have misled me about rate of fuel consumption, 15mins fuel only lasted 10, I think this is probably due to the burner not getting to "terminal heat" in the short runs, thus when it's hot hot, it evaps the alc more rapidly and burns more fierce. That's sort of a good thing, means it's a "higher power" burner than I thought...but...
Most of the burner heat was wasted heating up the stand... yeah I suspected this problem, it's quite a lump of metal, with unnecessarily large "vanes" of legs, and has as much surface contact with the pot as it lets the pot expose to burner. Not sure at the moment whether I'm going to hack away at it to remove "heatsink" surface, and limit contact area with pot, or start afresh, make a replacement... don't think I have any suitable wire, would like a little more robust than coathanger... Not sure if I mentioned I found a perforated metal "basket" to use as a wind shield... I may just integrate with that, put some long bolts in to hold pot.
So stand got super hot in 10 mins, pot not so much, so transferred it to kitchen stove, took a minute to boil from there, let it perk 3 mins, which I have been told is max not to kill the coffee, and turned it off... Coffee was meh, I'd filled pot to 5 cup level and put 5 scoops of Folgers in. It was weak, so not sure if I should have perked longer, or used more coffee... however, the Folgers we have been getting recently has been disappointing in our drip machine, on the weak side in that, so not sure how much to blame the coffee at the moment. Yeah I gave up on trying to find a cheaper commercial medium grind for now, not paying $15 for a pound of custom coffee, though if I find a cheap grinder I might pick beans up from bulk store, I just rattled the folgers to make sure all the dusty stuff went to the bottom and used that, not a heck of a lot got into the pot, just a bit of dust, and the pot design helped prevent it from coming out in the pour.
Anyway, upshot of that is, I think I've got enough burner and I think the pot might make reasonable coffee with some adjustments to coffee fill.
Jack of all trades, Doctor of rocket surgery and fellow of the noble college of shadetree meddlers. "in argentum tenax vinculum speramus"