Once they’re done arguing about motorcycles, tires and oil choices, most ADVriders love to talk about tools and gadgets, especially camping equipment. Here’s a new piece of outdoors kit for y’all to talk about then: The FireTower camp stove.

The FireTower camp stove is a wood burner, which is in itself nothing new or fancy. We’ve been using these to heat up our food ever since Neanderthals discovered canned beans.

Two design features make the FireTower a little more interesting than an old-fashioned hobo stove. First, the FireTower is a rocket-style stove, with fuel and air feeding from the bottom to make the blaze all the hotter. There’s a feed chute on the side of the stove that you can pack full of twigs and small sticks, letting gravity move the wood into the stove as it burns from below. If you’ve ever tried to keep twigs constantly fed into a rocket stove while also accomplishing other dinner-making tasks, you might appreciate while this basic level of automation could be a good thing.

The other useful design feature is a takedown capability. The FireTower folds down into a small, flat package when you remove a pin, allowing you to cram it into a stuffsack and then jam it into a pannier much more easily. That’s good for portability, and it’s even better when you realize there’s no need for a fuel canister, saving spaceandmoney. Win-win.

Speaking of money: The FireTower is currently running a Kickstarter fundraiser, with a €59 pledge getting you a FireTower stoveif it makes it to production. That version of the stove is stainless steel; designer Arnaud Desseyn would like to also make a titanium version, but he figures he’d need to raise €100,000 to make that happen. He says the money is needed “to make new molds for the titanium version and need to reach the minimum order quantity.”

Needless to say, €100,000 would pay for a lot of hobo stoves, which are generally made for the princely sum of zero dollars from a discarded can. Despite their bulk, mess and a design that’s decidedly less slick, it’s easy to see the advantage …

For more details, and to see the current funding level for this project, visit the FireTower’sKickstarter page.