Slobo - the lightweight DIY stove

A Do It Yourself (DIY) stove, which is easy to make, extremly light (22 gram, without fuel) and extremely slow.

With a small t-light (standard) the boil time is approximately 100min for 0.25 litres of water, starting at 23C. With a t-light that fits snuggly in to the stove, the boil time is reduced to respectable 60 min. Slow boil!

Construction: the pictures speak for themself. Cut a can to get the heating unit and a lid. The heating unit should have a few holes in it to enable air circulation. Four cuts in the top of the heating unit allows for air and stability for the can.

The good things with Slobo are:
-Price, which is close to nothing.
-Easy to make.
-You will improve your patience.
-You can almost always build one.
-It is a good reason to bring beer on a hiking trip (emergency stove!)

Main drawback, after accepting that not everything in the world should be super-jetboil-fast, is that the construction is a bit fragile and not so stable. But you can probably mend it if you buckle it and it is not difficult to come up with ideas to make it more stable.

Ideal use:
-Blackouts
-Hunting (you´ll spend a few hours at the same spot)
-Ultra light backpacking, 22 gram < 1 oz, holy ****!!

Improvements:
-By adding insulation to the can you may reduce the boil time down to 40 min (with the big light), according to preliminary calculations.
- By cutting up two or maybe three small t-lights and putting them into the stove the boil time can be reduced significantly, the drawback is that you might get an aggresive fire in the stove, when the temprature reaches 400C all the paraffin will ignite. DANGEROUS.
-Extra-duty-combat-version may be developed using tin cans.

The small t-light is good for boiling a little more than 2 times, the big one boils 0.25 liters 10 times.

Caution:
The can may reach 100C (kind of the intention).
Paraffin is dangerous when heated.

Turn the mobile phone upside down

Mobile phones are no ergonomic wonders. But one easy thing that could be done is to turn the layout 180 degrees, i.e. buttons on top and screen below (especially for "candy bar phones"). If you hold the phone in the traditional way you have something like 1-2 cm to hold on to... if you rotate it you get a really steady grip and probably reduce the risk of "sms-thumb". Honestly try it! You might think that the thumb will cover the screen, but that's not the case. One thing that might happen is that the thumb provides some shade, making it easier to use the phone outdoors...

I know that this post is a bit late... only troglodytes use candy bar phones these days and they are a bit conservative... so the market potential for this idea is low, but anyway, just needed to point it out (old idea). Anyway the concept might be applicable for other phone designs as well (phones with qwerty keyboard?).

Customer base: 1 (troglodytes)
Implementation: 5 (extremely easy)
Potential: 5

How much can you take, Insurance Inc.

Insurance for everything is the motto of today!

What happens if you lose your mobile phone, your bike gets stolen, your playstation fails… its a disaster! And of course you need an insurance to protect you from that. Or, wait a minute! If you are at average risk, get the average share of bad things, then you are better of if you invest the money in a buffer for all those smaller nuisances. The reason is very simple, since, insurance companies have administration, profit margins, customers who cheat (yeah I really had 19inch titanium wheels), and bonuses, you should be a very lucky (or rather unlucky) getting back more than you pay….

The idea is to start an insurance company that clearly states that its existence is for those critical hits you cannot take. Like your car is totally demolished, your house burns down, etc…

So the insurance is based on the two questions
A: How much can you take?
B: How often?

Then you get a terrible excess in case of damage but a very nice insurance cost.

Furthermore, the insurance company, “How much can you take, Inc” offers you to take care of the money that you save, at a good interest rate, helping you building a bigger buffer, which will help you lower your cost of insurances even more in the future. Of course this will leave you with a bit of an uncomfortable feeling. But if your bike is stolen you will get a candy bar from the insurance company… as a demonstration of goodwill. Anyway, if you think that you are as careful as the average person, there is lots of money to be saved…

Comments:
The idea is very good, but I see a number of problems:
1 It is all to popular to sign up for an insurance.
2 You must get a buffer…
3 To start an insurance company you need something like 10 000 000 EUR in buffer.

Customer base: 4
Implementation: 2 (higher if you got 10 million EUR, duhh)
Potential: 8

Reason to party/celebration

To celebrate the start of this blog i propose the following idea:
A website that helps you find a reason for celebration! We all now that its to looong time between birthdays and other days of celebration (quite often one year!). This calls for drastic measures and the realization that year is not the only important measure of time. To be more specific; when you are around 27 you should not miss to celebrate 10000 days! Likewise 11000 should be considered as a great achievement, at least on par with making say 31. Then we enter the area of cool numbers, like 10101 and 11111 days..., but hey there are more measures, months, weeks, minutes, seconds, moon rotations and so on... Cool numbers to celebrate might be prime numbers and even numbers in binary code and so on...

The website provides fields where you can enter a number of important dates and a time frame for when you need your reason for celebration... voila! You get a number of reasons for celebration.

Ranking:
Customer base: 3 (many would like this, but low willingness to pay, internet is free...)
Implementation: 5 (easy to implement)
Potential: 15

Please post link in the comments;-)