DIY Stove Hanging Kit For A Remote Canister Stove

Hanging a stove is a practice with which I imagine not many people are familiar. It is common with climbers, but hasn’t seen much use in the general outdoor community. The concept is to use a device to hang the pot and stove above the ground while you are cooking with it. Why? Well, there are several reasons you may want to or have to do that. If you find yourself on terrain where there simply is no space to set up a stove on the ground, you may have to hang it. Alternatively, if you are trapped by a storm inside your tent, you may have to use a stove hanging kit so you can use the stove inside the tent.

 

Above picture is from Markhor Climbing.

These days stove hanging is done primarily with integrated stove/pot systems like Jetboil or the MSR Reactor. The companies even make their own stove hanging kits. In the past though, just about any stove has been modified for hanging.

Well, as you know lately I have been using a Kovea Spider remote canister stove. I’ve also been testing out the Mountain Hardwear Direkt 2 tent, which unlike my GoLite Shangri-La 3, does not have an open floor. That makes using the stove inside the tent difficult. One of the solutions has been to suspend the stove within the tent. To that end, I tired to make a hanging kit for it.

Why not just get a Jetboil stove? Well, upright canister stoves like Jetboil have serious limitations in the cold. I would much rather stick with a remote cansiter stove that allows for inverted canister use. That way I can run the stove in liquid fuel mode at much lower temperatures than I could with a standard Jetboil or a MSR Reactor stove. 

My initial attempt was to use an existing stove hanging kit produced by Jetboil. It’s a very nice design, and I figured it would make my job easier. Here is the result:

Now, those of you who are familiar with the Jetboil hanging kits know there is more to it than that. One step at a time.

The Jetboil hanging kit consists of a folding triangle with wires that connect at a central hook above the stove. The triangle is designed to grab and hold the base of the Jetboil stove. What I’ve done is to thread it under the legs of the Kovea Spider, which worked out very well and made for a stable fit.

That was the easy part. With an integrated stove/pot system like the Jetboil, that is all you need because the fuel is attached to the stove. With a remote canister stove like the Kovea Spider however, the fuel canister is left hanging by the fuel hose. In all honesty, that is not a huge problem. If I am in my tiny tent cooking with a suspended stove, I can easily keep the canister on my lap, but I wanted to make a complete system. So, the next part of the project was to find a way to easily connect the fuel canister to the body of the stove.

First, I took a regular paperclip, straightened it out, and folded it into a triangle. One end of the paperclip I bent into a hook, so that the other end can catch under it. I played around with it until the triangle was tight enough so that it can securely catch under the lip around the opening of the canister.

I then made some hooks from another paperclip and attached them to this triangle with short pieces of wire. The hooks connect to the legs of the stove.

 

And that’s all there is to it… sort of. Happy with the result, I put a pot of water on the stove, and lit it up. By the time I pulled back to take a picture, this was the result:

Apparently the Jetboil Hanging kit is not made from metal. I thought it was aluminum, but it’s not. Within seconds of making contact with the flame, it melted. Not good, and back to the drawing board.

The solution, and a lazy one at that, was to remove the wires from the kit and slide them directly onto the legs of the stove. You lose a bit of clearance by doing that, but it works fine none the less. Oh, yeah, and it works when lit.

The only minor difficulty was that the loops in the wire from the Jetboil hanging kit that were attached to the triangle were a bit too small to slide onto the legs. However I noticed that the loops which attached to the central hook were larger. The solution was to just turn the cables around and slide the small loops onto the central hook and then use the larger ones on the stove legs.

All of the components of the final stove hanging kit weigh 0.6oz. I’m sure there are better and more creative ways to do all this, but this is what I came up with. I prefer to keep the canister upright when hanging a stove in a tent and I find that the heat of the stove inside the tent keeps the canister warm enough to operate, but if you want it inverted, you can certainly modify the above design so that the hooks catch the canister’s lower lip when inverted. Here is a much more polished design by David Kreindler that he calls Cryophilio. He actually designed his own legs to they can grip the canister without added parts (beyond my skill level).

It makes my design look rather pathetic, but I hope it gives you some ideas.

Source: http://woodtrekker.blogspot.com/2014/07/diy-stove-hanging-kit-for-remote.html