I made a couple of the pot stands/windscreens for my alcohol stove last week, with the help of RobertLipe, FullCt and PPPorch, so I thought I would share. These are pretty rough, as I did not have the patience to do nice finish work on the prototypes, it may also have something to do with the Guinness cans we were emptying that night as well.
The first one is a super simple design to construct. I took an old tin I had lying around the office and drilled holes for ventilation and then mad an X potholder out of some 1-inch aluminum blank, by cutting slits for the crossfitting and then two smaller slits on each blank to lock it onto the tin.
It works well, in principle, and I think would be great for a stove that required a priming pan, since the tin could serve as the pan. I found that when boiling water with it everything worked well, but a word of caution. Those aluminum crosspieces get wicked hot and they retain their heat for quite some time after the stove goes out. I melted off some skin by brushing up against one of them. It also seems to hold the pot fairly steadily, but you have to make sure that you are sitting very level when you start.
The one thing that I really did not like about this X-holder is that it does not pack down in a way that I like. The tin fits inside of a pot comfortably, but the crosspieces were too long for anything I have and making them shorter made the whole thing a little too precarious to balance for my tastes. So it was back to the drawing board…
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