Stove Project - Introduction

Those of you who have been on Nahani will know that we refer to the kerosene cooker in the galley as Stove, because it has a defnite personality. It is temperamental, can be seriously difficult, and typically chooses to have an Issue when it causes maximum inconvenience. Stove has its own dedicated box of repair parts, and the engineer has spent countless hours coaxing it back into operation. Hundreds of dollars have been spent on new burners in the six plus years we have owned the boat. From time to time, Stove fills the boat with smoke and coats the walls and roof in the galley with a fine film of soot. Stove smells, both in operation and at rest. Lighting it is an art, requiring priming with metho followed by patient watching, of which only the cook and engineer are masters, and even they have the odd failure. Lighting it in a heaving sea is well-nigh impossible. The oven has a thermometer but no thermostat, so cooking anything that requires accurate temperature control is chancy, unless the cook is prepared to sit by the stove doing constant adjustment to the burner to maintain tbe desired temperature.
In Stove's defence, once the burners are alight they are hot and will heat food or boil water faster than any gas stove. And over the years, hundreds of nutritious and delicious meals have been concocted thereon or therein.
Now Stove appears to be terminally ill. What was a three burner stove with oven is now a 1 to 2 burner stove, no oven. No oven because one of the kerosene tanks under the oven has a very small leak, which becomes larger under pressure as the oven gets hot, and then catches fire, burning with a smelly yellow flame which deposits soot all over the inside of the oven. 1 to 2 burners because one of the three burners is permanently decomissioned because of a stripped thread in the burner mounting, and the pricker has packed up on one of the two remaining burners, so when it clogs up, intervention is required by the engineer before it will burn properly again.
We've decided that we've had enough of spending time and money trying to keep Stove alive, and that it is past its use-by date. A replacement will be bought and hopefully fitted while we are in Queensland. The distributors for the new Force 10 stove the cook wants to buy are based in the Gold Coast, so this seems like a good place to do the changeover.