I purchased one of the St Paul Mercantile stoves to replace the alcohol seaswing stove in my previous boat. It is a loud "roarer" burner which I do not think is totally bad. You can definitely hear if the flame goes out unexpectedly. This lets you attend to the stove before it starts oozing kerosene everywhere. It is also possible to adjust the flame height just by listening to it instead of looking under the pot while it is cooking.

It does not have an internal pricker. It comes with a few external cleaning picks. Getting any type of burner with an built-in cleaning pick is a big step up in price. 

I think the burner at the link below will screw directly on to the stove from St Paul Mercantile. The burner is significantly more expensive than the stove:

http://www.sparesmarine.co.uk/webshop/cookers/028-paraffin-cooker/all-spares/taylors-ctk1035p4ger-paraffin-burner-assembly-complete-4-leg/

I definitely recommend building an wick to preheat the stove with alcohol as James Baldwin suggests:

http://www.atomvoyages.com/gallery/photo-gallery/image.raw?view=image&type=orig&id=108

It is much easier and safer to light the stove using this tool.

Scott.

While investigating the kerosene stove option I was told that the best burners are a German product, self pricking and of course made from good quality materials.  The problem with buying stuff from India and/or China is that unless it's custom made the materials will generally be of the cheapest variety. 

I have still have close contacts in China who can make items to a specific design on a small scale, but the design work and detail need to be exact.....  

Peter

Well, that answers Jim's question about 5 pages down this thread :)

Chris

In haste;

here is the link to the German shop which sells all kinds of traditional lamps, stoves and wotnot.

The alcohol stove (1 or two burners) is shown here:

Each burner only puts out 1kW, but for small work and simmering it must be good, and thanks to its oxygen-rich blue flame, I beet it is more economical in use  -  and produces probably much less soot, as well.

The alcohol burner I bough (from India) was of the little dish type. I liked that it has a screw-on tight lid, which lets one shut it down after use and use the remaining alcohol later. The idea was to see if I could later find a way to feed this little thing from a tank below (via one of those dose pumps).

Arne

PS: That German stove above, appears to come with a brass tank, now.

PPS: I checked the Enders 2017 catalogue. It appears that it is all gas, now, no alcohol or kerosene stoves.

Darren Bos wrote:

I learned a new word tonight, "spirituskocher".  Apparently the Germans have been making Maxie-type stoves for some time.  Searching spirituskocher on ebay.de yielded results for quite a few stoves that work like a Maxie, even a nice stainless unit by a company called Enders.  Most of these you would just take the burner and maybe the tank, and then build yourself a new enclosure.

This is very interesting.  Trust the Germans to make them.  The Enders looks neat, but of course you would have to find someone to make sea rails, etc, for it.

I also found a new stove available on Amazon as well as some camping stores, it is called a Spirituskocher Salsa.  The burner is similar to the Maxie, but it has a nice brass appearance to it.  Maybe it would be longer lived than the Maxie burner?

Here is a link to a review of the Salsa stove that gives some nice detailed pics of the burner.  Here is a video of the same stove for those who are wondering how these stoves work or those who would like to see the details of the inside of the burner (look around 6:45 in the video).

I'm not sure how long-lived the framework of the Salsa would be, but powder coated steel should last long enough to figure out if you want to build a nice stainless body for the burners.   For 65 Euro for the one burner model (105 Euro for the two burner) maybe someone is interested in the experiment.