Episode: 666
Title: HPR0666: Salvaging old Coleman lanterns and stoves
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0666/hpr0666.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:38:46

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Hello, this is Brother Mouse, and I have an episode today on finding, maintaining, and using those old liquid fuel lanterns and stoves that you find at garage sales.
And doing it on the cheap. In the Americas, most of the time, these lanterns and stoves will be made by the Coleman company.
And they will run camping fuel, also known as Coleman fuel, or nappha. Outside the Americas, local lanterns and stoves will probably run on kerosene, also known as paraffin and many locations.
For the purposes of this discussion today, I will stick with Coleman because it's a very common term in the Americas and it's what I know the best.
So, if you're in Britain, you can just mentally substitute in the word tilly because you guys have a lot of tilly lamps and things like that.
And other folks, including Northern Europeans, will probably see Optimus, the Svea, I think that's how you say it, Petra Max and those kinds of brands.
I'm going to cover why you should care about these old stoves and lanterns, what basic types there are, theory of operation, purchasing, repairing, and maintaining.
Let's start with why you should care. There are thousands of unloved Coleman lanterns and stoves and garage sales and sitting in sheds and barns and garages all over the place.
You can sometimes even get them for free dumpster diving. They can be really cheap. Personally, I don't spend more than $10 on one. If I can get a salvageable Coleman unit for $1 or $2, that's a definite buy for me.
Five bucks I usually buy and 10 if it's pretty decent. So, they don't cost a lot. They're very functional. You can get a 50, 60 year old lantern that works just like the day it was made and will light up your backyard or your fishing trip or use it for emergency preparations.
Same thing with the stoves. There are people who can still go out and cook on a 1920s Coleman stove or gas plant outside. I tend to cook on Coleman gear. Add on my porch during this summer when it's really hot and I don't want to overload my 1960s air conditioning or if I'm cooking something like fish frying fish and you don't want to get the fish smell in your house, you can cook outside on the porch and be just fine.
The design of a lot of this gear is absolutely gorgeous, like a kind of nostalgic steam punk look. Just really good looking gear. I'll have some pictures in the show notes or links to pictures in the show notes. Most of the modern gear is going to propane these days but I'm going to be talking about the liquid fuel models because it's cheaper and it requires skill unlike propane which is basically screw on and light it up and go using liquid fuel.
The fuel under pressure requires some attention and some skill and some techniques so I'm going to share that with you today.
I am recording this today because I'm in the middle of a four day snow in Texas. We've had ice and snow here which is very unusual and we had rolling blackouts where people had no power which means that most people in electric houses can't cook.
I had both light and heat because my Coleman gear was ready to roll and so I was able to cook and see what was going on out on the back patio using this old $2 gear.
All right let's talk about the basic types of gear very briefly what you're going to see in the lantern world there are either single or double mantles and the mantles are those little sock like things hanging down that glow. They actually produce the light.
There is very little functional difference between single and double mantles and a lot of times it's a matter of preference. In theory the double throws less of a shadow because the generator tube which you'll hear about later does not throw a shadow.
It does not throw a shadow from the mantle in in the real world I think that makes almost no difference whatsoever on the stove front either stoves are large suitcase looking devices which have two or three burners in them and these are called oddly enough suitcase stoves or they can be small single burner.
They've got kind of camping gear and those are called traditionally sportsters so those can be two different ways the sportsters tend to be all assembled together in one piece and things don't come off of them but the suitcase ones normally store the fuel tank and stuff inside and you take it out and hook it up when you run it.
So those are the basic types of gear that you'll be looking for when you've got your $5 in hand and you're prowling the garage sales.
Let's spend a few minutes talking about theory of operation how these devices actually work and that will help you understand what you're looking for when you're buying them and it will help you understand what you're working on when you start to hack these things and noodle with them and mess with them.
The word that pressure gear people use is fetal FETTLE which means to fool around to mess around with your gear to make it better make it work or just for fun.
All right unlike an old railroad lantern that has a wick which is unpressurized liquid fuel pressure gear is literally pressurized to about two atmospheres or about 30 psi.
The fuel is kept pressurized in a fuel tank usually called a fount like the word fountain without the AIN at the end of it.
This fuel tank is filled usually about three quarters of the way up and has some kind of a built-in hand pump mechanism.
Take the little pump and you unscrew it turn or two and put your thumb over the end and it goes...
So you probably have seen your father or your grandfather do that or maybe in the movies and that's what actually pressurizes the air inside of the fuel tank and that's what provides pressure to move the fuel throughout the whole system.
Connected to or very nearby the fount is a fuel valve which regulates the release of fuel out of this pressurized fount into the rest of the system.
Normally it'll just be a knob to turn.
All right leaving the fuel valve now we usually will enter a generator also called a vaporizer or gasifier.
The purpose of this generator is to turn the pressurized liquid fuel into vapor so that it can be efficiently burned by the rest of the system.
Now the thing that freaks people out particularly with stoves is they look at this generator and notice that it generally passes directly through an open flame.
In other words the burner which we'll get to here in just a second actually puts flames right on the generator.
That's where the heat comes from to do the vaporizing. This causes some weirdness during startup and we'll talk about that in just a little bit but it is in fact designed in such that the heat from the burning system provides the energy to vaporize the incoming fuel.
In a lantern the generator runs up beside the glowing mantles rather than through an open flame and that's where it picks up the heat.
Regardless of whether it's a stove or a lantern usually after going through the generator the now gasified fuel takes a U-turn through a little manifold normally called an air tube.
This air tube does two things. First of all it's usually shaped like a U so it physically rerouts this superheated vapor back down to where you want it into the burner.
Whether it's going to be burned as an open flame with the stove or stuffed into a sock mantle and produce light either way it gets where you need the vapor.
Second it also mixes with atmospheric air. This is where the air comes from to achieve stoichiometric efficiency.
Remember this air tube because we'll talk about it later when we bring home our first piece of gear from a garage sale.
So after we leave the air tube or manifold we are at the burner where in a stove you'd have a burner where the flames just come out like on a gas range and cook your food.
Or it'll go down into little sock like mantles that glow in the case of a lantern.
It's really a pretty simple setup and there are either two or three moving parts in the system depending on whether or not you have a tip cleaner.
But basically it's pretty straightforward. I don't have any mechanical skills really. It's simple enough for me to understand and work on and have fun with.
The parts are cheap enough and available enough to where it's just fun to noodle with.
Now that you know how these systems work I'm going to give you a few warning things that you need to be aware of.
Number one, kerosene is a pretty safe fuel to mess with. You're not going to blow yourself up with kerosene probably.
With Coleman fuel and unleaded which some of them run on, you can blow yourself up real good. So pay attention.
It's a common for experienced pressure fuel people to work to do their first lighting out in the middle of the yard just in case and to have a fire extinguisher handy just in case.
I personally have never needed to use a fire extinguisher but I have been glad in the past before that I was actually working in the yard and not under the eaves of my house or something.
Now the next thing I want to share with you is what scares most non hacker types when they see one of these devices being lit for the first time.
During the initial lighting before the system comes up to operating temperature there can be flare up there can be inches or you know a foot of big yellow flames coming out of the burner or out of the mantle area.
This is because the generator has not come to temperature high enough to vaporize the fuel and it's a very inefficient burn of actually liquid fuel.
Now this settles down quickly within you know a few seconds or certainly less than a minute but it can be disconcerting to onlookers and if you're doing this for yourself for the first time if you've never been near anyone who's lit one of these things.
You may want to go on to YouTube and do a search for Coleman lantern light up or how to light a Coleman stove that kind of thing and you'll get a feel for how high that initial flare up happens and it'll keep you from panicking.
Once it comes to operating temperature it'll settle down to either a nice tight blue beautiful flame on a stove or a nice blinding white light in the case of a lantern.
In either case these pieces get really really hot during normal operation.
A stove obviously gets hot I don't have to tell you not to touch a stove that's third three year old stuff but it is not immediately obvious to onlookers that a lantern gets really hot.
I've put an infrared gun on a lantern before and I regularly get over 500 degrees on the top of a lantern that includes a little screw that holds a lid on.
So always use the bail the bail is the metal handle that you use to carry the lantern always use the bail and I'm always careful to also lay the bail down in other words don't leave it sticking straight up because it can pick up residual heat and it might be hard to pick up so I always lay the bail down because the fuel is under pressure be sure sure sure to never open up the fuel cap on a pressurized device until it's completely cool.
You can probably imagine that opening up a fuel cap on a hot lantern or stove would be bad in opening up the fuel cap on a pressurized and running stove or lantern might be the last mistake you ever make so I would not do that.
Make sure that you let it get cool before you open up a release pressure because the fuel valve is before the generator before the air tube and before the burner or mantles there is a certain amount of lag time between closing the valve completely and the flame going out.
So it may take 60 seconds and it may take just a few seconds it just depends on how the machine is running but bear in mind that it's not going to be turning it off like on your gas range at the house.
Now let's talk about how to find these old pieces of gear they're very easy to find on eBay but you have to pay shipping which can be expensive.
I know the good place would be Craigslist. I troll Craigslist and watch for lantern gear and if it's cheap enough I usually swing by and pick it up.
You can find freebies on free cycle I have gotten multiple stoves and lanterns for free of a free cycle and put them to good use.
I rebuilt them and I gave one to my neighbor who runs a Boy Scout troop and that kind of thing so it's just you can find them for free or cheap.
It is very common to find them in estate sales and garage sales yard sales that kind of deal.
My favorite price to pay is a dollar. I will pay up to ten bucks for something very interesting that I would like.
The most I've ever paid was twenty five dollars for a three burner a new or nearly new three burner dual fuel suitcase stove and dual fuel means is designed to run both unleaded and Coleman fuel.
So that's the most I've ever paid for one my most recent two things that I bought and I'll share this with you because I got one completed and I'm still working on the last one.
The second to last thing I bought was at a yard sale I was at a local Masonic lodge was having a yard sale and I was walking around looking and there was a cardboard box and all I could see was some paper jammed in a box and at the top of it.
It was a green lantern tops sticking out and I couldn't tell anything nothing about what was in this box and I said what do you want for this box and they said a dollar.
So I said okay here's your dollar and I took it home flushed it with fresh fuel tied on a new mantle and fired it up and it works.
The dollar is beautiful it's perfect it's it's probably I don't know if my favorite but it's certainly a wonderful lantern.
The most recent thing I bought I'd actually been looking around actively trying to find a very small what's called hiking lantern that Coleman makes and they're really really small.
I mean they're not like the big size that you see a grandpa here and they're about half that size and they're built very delicately so that you can put them inside of a backpack.
Well I was at a yard sale and saw one new inbox and they said how much you want for it and they said ten bucks and I was like fine.
I went ahead and gave ten bucks for it because first of all it was a new inbox second of all it was something hard to find.
I mean you don't see many of those around and I'd actually been actively searching for one and the universe just said here here's your hiking lantern.
So this particular one turned out to be a new inbox 1990 to 22 B is in Bravo single male hiking lantern and I'll put a picture of that in the notes for you as well.
I am I've got it partially disassembled at the moment I think I need to rebuild part of the valve and this one I don't have a lot of experience with Coleman gear that's this new stuff built since the 80s has a different
different set up on some of the valves and and most of my stuff is from the 50s and 60s as soon as I get it put back together I will post picture.
One of the things to keep in mind about Coleman gear is that if you're looking at a lantern and it has a little cup around the generator where the generator comes up through the base that's probably a kerosene model which are a little bit more rare.
In general the lanterns with the straight-sided lanterns tend to be newer and the ones with the bulb shaped or round lanterns tend to be older.
I mean there are there are differences but but that's kind of how it goes.
If you're in a situation where you can pick up and look at this lantern there's also date codes the year is traditionally stamped on the bottom of the fount on the on a lantern and it's both the year and month.
On the sportster stoves it tends to be stamped on the bottom just like on a lantern. On the suitcase stoves it's stamped usually on the bottom of the suitcase if you were to flip the whole thing upside down and look.
But a lot of times you know flipping it over and inspecting it that carefully might might tip your hand that you're more interested in it and the price might go up.
And also the actual year usually doesn't matter unless you're looking for something very specific.
One of the things you want to do while you've got this thing in your hand is to shake it gently and one of the warning signs to listen for is sounds of solid material in the fount and the fuel tank that usually would indicate rust and rust is one of the few things that makes a Coleman stove or lantern not worth the time to restore.
Pretty much anything other than rust is worth restoring or physical damage if it's got dents or bins or something you may not want to restore that.
Also if there's physical holes in the fount like it's rusted completely through it's just not possible to restore.
You might use it for parts for something else but it's not going to be functional for the most part.
For most lanterns missing the glass globe is not a deal killer you can buy replacement for less than ten bucks somewhere but I would probably stick to the one to five dollar range on those because you're going to have to buy the globe.
If you hear liquid fuel sloshing around on the inside you might ask them when the last time it was they burned it.
If it's had fuel inside of it for 15-20 years and that does happen the inside can get varnished and it might take a little bit extra time to clean up.
About the only unit you know in a hundred years of production that people generally will advise you to stay away from is a lantern built by a Coleman four sears and it's called the 275 lantern.
It has a distinctive shape when you see it it's going to look funny and it's brown in color and so the combination of the brown color and the poor design has lent it the name to it.
People refer to this as the turd lantern so that might give you an idea of why you might want to avoid it.
So let's say you're brought your treasure home you've got your lantern or your stove in your hands you take it home.
The first thing I would do is use a light brush or some kind just kind of knock the big chunks of dust off of it.
Traditionally when I'm working on new or existing gear I will wear those vinyl or latex gloves because you're going to end up with fuel on you and maybe dirt and grime and crap like that so I just wear a pair of disposable gloves and it seems to make clean up a little easier.
First thing I would do normally is to hold loosen up the plunger unscrew it once or twice and gently give it a couple of pumps pump pump pump pump pump pump pump and see if it seems to be holding pressure.
Normally after about ten pumps you should be able to feel whether it's holding pressure it would not be unusual at this point for it not to be.
The gasket on the fuel cap lid could be dried out in which case it's building pressure but not holding it or it could be that the fuel valve is open or stuck open in which case you need to close it for it to build and keep pressure.
Or maybe that the little was called pump cup inside of the little pump that you're pumping maybe isn't sealing very well and on older ones are made of leather and you can disassemble it and soak it in either needs foot oil or motor oil for a few hours and it will come back to being its delightful self.
I'll have some notes in the bottom and I'll put some show notes that show you how to disassemble those and do that kind of work.
While you're letting that pump cup soak in oil you might as well put some fresh fuel in the fount and swish it around and that will help pick up any debris that's in there.
Now what I usually do is I usually reclaim that fuel by running it back through a coffee filter I have like a funnel and then put a coffee filter in there and so I swish swish swish and then dump the fuel back out of the fount and I do that a few times until basically there's no more particulate matter coming out of it and so that way you're not losing or wasting any fuel and you're getting it nice and cleaned out on the inside.
Next thing I would do is if you have a suitcase stove I would use a air hose with compressor and blow air through the air tube and the reason for that is is that it's open and there the air tube is open until you actually assemble the fuel tank assembly into it for use.
And spiders love to crawl in there and spin webs and if you don't blow that out and I usually will also use a pipe cleaner in there.
There can be spider webs which will catch raw fuel which will drip down instead of going into the burner during the warm up phase and now you've got liquid gasoline like fuel burning in the bottom of your stove which is bad.
So a similar kind of thing can happen with a lantern because if the mantle has broken and it normally will be broken when you buy one at a garage cell.
Spiders can crawl back up inside of that air tube and do the same thing so to clean that out basically you would just use the screw, take off the top, take off the globe, take off any little bit of mantle is in there and stick your air hose and your pipe cleaner up in that air tube and that will help knock out any spider webs.
So once we have it put back together and holding pressure we're ready to do a first burn. We're not guaranteed to have a good clean burn the first time but basically we're just kind of looking to see whether the parts are holding together.
One of the tricks I've learned from old timers is that one of the best ways to get a good clean start with that a lot of sputtering and huge flare up is to get your ear near the device.
Crack the fuel valve until you hear this fuel start to enter the system so when you first crack it you'll hear just plain air.
Then when the fuel starts to enter the system through the fuel valve you'll hear it starts sputtering and there's no flames are involved we're just talking about just opening the valve cracking the valve just a little bit and so it'll sound like this.
And when you start to hear that start to get in there and not just the pure air sound close that valve because it's ready to start dispensing fuel and you want to be ready for that.
Sometimes there'll be a lighting lever where you need to like turn this down for the first 60 seconds it's basically like an enrichment or like a choke manual choke on a car.
Sometimes you'll do that a lot of times it'll actually be instructions for lighting right on the side of the device it's very handy.
Otherwise you can look it up online but the object of the game is you know turn your lighting lever if there is one.
Get your flame in place and I use like a barbecue lighter because it's long.
Crack that valve open usually about a quarter of a turn and it'll take a few seconds to catch.
Then you'll hear the air and the fuel start to come out.
And I'll say I go pop like that and it'll start to flame.
Now normally I already warned you that there's going to be some flare up in the beginning.
Kind of ugly big ugly burning yellow flames coming out of it but you know foothold or whatever don't you worry about it you're okay.
As that generator starts to heat up flame will start to tighten up contract and turn to a gorgeous blue color on a stove.
Now in a lantern this flame will actually be coming out the top of the lantern through the vents and then once it gets up the temperature you'll hear it kind of go pop pop pop pop like that.
And it will you'll start to see the mantles really glow very pretty and there will be no more flames will just be kind of a blinding white light.
Now at this point if you do get pressure and you do get fire but it never settles down to a nice white light or it never settles down to a nice blue flame the next thing to look at would be a generator.
That generator can be unscrewed and replaced.
That tends to be the most expensive thing that you would change.
I would say that depending on the device they run somewhere between five and fifteen dollars.
So I wouldn't change it unless you know for sure that that one needs to be changed.
Some of them are all metal on the inside and they can actually be refurbed if you like.
You can actually super heat them with the torch and clean them out with with certain kind of solvents that you would have already in your house.
That's kind of an advanced topic and I won't discuss it here but I will have links to that kind of thing for you.
If you were cranking up your device and it happened to be a lantern then you would need to have tied on a fresh mantle.
You can get those from Walmart for you know for for two dollars or something they're pretty cheap.
They make some with little metal clips but those suck they're hard to put on and they cost a lot more.
Just suck it up and get the little tie on mantles and learn how to tie those on.
I think you'll enjoy doing it.
You'll want to burn off the mantles before you light the lantern and that basically means once you get them tied on then just light it with a match.
Don't touch them. Just light them and they'll burn off.
They'll just catch on fire and leave just an ash matrix.
You'll talk about that in just a second.
Try not to breathe that smoke.
First of all it smells really bad. Second of all it has rare earth stuff in it that you don't want to breathe.
The original mantles were embedded with a radioactive thorium which glowed with a brilliant blue-white light.
But the radioactivity freaked people out and rightly or otherwise.
And so now it usually uses atrium another rare earth that's much less radioactive.
The miracle of these mantles is that they operate by what's called a candle luminescence or something like that.
Basically these rare earths when they're embedded and impregnated into this fabric.
When they get to a certain temperature they don't just glow the way that normal things glow like if you heat up something and it glows red and then white or whatever.
I think it's called black box luminosity and the color varies with the temperature which is why sometimes you see paint swatches and things described in terms of degrees Kelvin.
These rare earth impregnated materials do something odd.
They don't give off much energy in the infrared range.
It's all shifted up into the white or at least to the visible area.
So they have this kind of highly pumped luminosity for whatever reason compared to normal things of that same temperature.
So they get really bright and it's an interesting thing to see. It'll hurt your eyes if you stare right at it.
Once you've got your device running, if you need to put it away and store it, I would dump out all the fuel, run it back through a coffee filter and store it.
For the next time that way it'll keep any fuel varnish from building up on the internal fuel air tubes.
Suit case stoves don't need anything special. They just fold up into a little steel case of their own.
So they're impermeable. You just stack those wherever you want.
The little sportster stoves I have found can be stored inside of coffee cans like the new Folgers or Maxwell House plastic coffee cans.
They just slip right down in there and the pump fits into one of the little finger grip parts and so that's a really great stackable container.
Cheap, light, waterproof or at least water resistant containers. I love them.
On the lanterns, people over the years have spent many hours building custom wooden cabinets or buying them. They tend to be expensive.
But what I've been doing is I just use like a pickle bucket, one of those big buckets with a pry off lid.
Whenever I get packages from Amazon with that thick bubble light lining, I just adhere bubble packing material to the inside of the pickle bucket and just set that lantern right down inside there.
It'll stack and it's nice and safe. It won't get beat up.
There are more advanced topics having to do with these Coleman lanterns and stoves that I will mention but not go into.
You can disassemble every single little tiny piece in these lanterns and down inside the found, you can unscrew the assembly off the found and get in there and replace tiny little parts if you like.
There are people who disassemble them and reassemble them into custom designs basically where they have different fonts and different tops to suit their purposes.
There are people who use different generator tubes with different what's called gas tips to convert regular Coleman fuel lanterns to kerosene.
I have done that on one. I find it actually runs on my case best on what's called an Amish blend which is 25% or so Coleman and 75% kerosene.
I did that as an experiment with one of my spare lanterns. In the show notes I'm going to put in some forums and links for you that may be useful in case you're interested in one final note that I'll add.
This will kind of tell you what kind of community is out there for pressure lanterns and pressure stoves.
Whenever someone on one of the forums either experiences a death in the family or maybe even that forum contributor dies and so on on the family comes on and mentions that people on the forum that night will break out their favorite lantern or the most appropriate lantern and the light it in memory of the person who has died.
I just love the idea of there being lanterns lining up the night all across the world for the deceased person and I like to think that maybe it's helping like their way to their final destination.
Well, I hope it's been a useful show and that it encourages you to pick up that orphaned stove or lantern that you find at the next garage sale or yard sale. Have fun.
Post pictures if you do adopt one. Bye bye.
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