What I did on Sunday...

Worth a read, in the it's about time department, and something you might want to watch..

I spent far too long yesterday working on my stainless steel, too-expensive, marine stove so I should warn you that I'm not really in a very good mood.

Fact is, I find I'm almost always pissed off when I have to work on some too-high priced bit of marine gear because when you tear something down to repair it, it's pretty obvious that corners were cut and it's nowhere near marine quality. Take my stainless stove for instance...

The outside of the stove is stainless but the stainless covers a lot of cheap galvanized steel and you'd think anyone designing or building marine gear would know that screwing stainless to galvanized steel is just rust waiting to happen.

I'm never at my best when I'm chipping rust and inhaling PB Blaster fumes...

Then there's the cost of replacement parts... most, I might add which are unavailable. A single part (trim ring) for one of my burners costs $20. A whole burner or something that you'd actually need to fix it if it's still available and your stove does not fit in the more common "we no longer support that model even though we still sell it" bracket you just know it's going to seriously cause a major disruption in the monthly budget.

Thing is, stoves are nowhere near rocket science and, last I heard, folks have known for like a century or so that dissimilar metals are something of a no no in a marine environment so there's really no excuse.

More frustrating is that for a lot less than the cost of a replacement burner I could buy a camping stove that works better, has a shitload more BTU's, and has parts easily available from the maker for sensible money...

Yes, I know that camping stoves do not have thermocouples but thermocouples are actually simple and cheap so if they did I doubt it would raise the price of the product more than 25%...

Of course, the real issue is not that the stove company designs bad stoves, doesn't support their product the way they should, and simply gouge to a silly degree on pricing. No, the real problem is that the sailing community continues to spend silly money for bad products and service...

We're the problem.

Listening to Adam Green with Ben Kweller

So it goes...