At the offroad park, we hand the axe to one of my buddy's sons, who's underage, and therefore hasn't been drinking like the rest of us.

Wel, had a chance to try this out today. Upside; insanely simple, dont have to search for a place to put it, if you can build a fire, you can use this. Downside; feeding the fire, and the size of the fuel. Now, neither of these are really a downside IMHO. After all, it IS a fire. But, it takes some prep time to get the fuel ready. And, boiling time is a little longer (I got it in about 15 mins from ignition) as you have to constantly pull the cup off to put more fuel in.
Another HUGE upside; no mess!! Its a self contained fireplace! When youre done, no fire scar, no ring! Just ashes, that you can either pack out or scatter! I punched a couple holes through the lid, put some baling wire through it, and packed out the ashes. This is so KISS I am kinda surprised I hadnt seen this before. I wrote a little more in my blog in my sig, if interested.

Glad you liked the paint can stove. Yes there is bit of downside with the feeding the wood to the fire. How much water did you have in the cup?

There also a lot of factors or any fuel or wood powered stove of this sort. These factors include ambient temperature, wind, type of fuel (some wood and petroleum gases burn slower/hotter or faster/cooler), how cold the water is to begin with etc. For example our multi-fuel stove as good as it is, claims a 3 minute time for boiling 1 LT of water. We have never come close to this yet...

The idea behind the paint can stove came from my outdoors mentor. I mentioned him a previous post and thread and I will repeat it here. When I was a young teenager, my outdoor mentor was one of the last modern day mountain men IMO.

This man eschewed many (but not all) modern day conveniences in the dawn of an era that saw many gadgets and products designed to "help" the modern day outdoors person survive.

His philosophy was simple, "Use what you have on hand and don't do wasting your money on all the hi-tech stuff". Although I did not always agree with this philosophy, I adopted much of it and the credit for the paint can stove that I demonstrated here last week, belongs solely to him. It is heartening to see that someone else has found that a simple design can work so well.

Its one of the Nato canteen cups, like 3/4 way full. Water was cold...was sitting in my jeep from the day before. And, yeah, stove times vary greatly from what is claimed, to what they actually produce. I have a nice little high speed canister stove I use for backpacking trips that claim a 3 minute boil. I usually get it between 3.5 & 4. Which is fine for me.
Your outdoor mentor sounded like a smart man. Mine I learned mostly on my own, with the exception of some classes in the army.
The boiling time doesnt really matter to me, as, well, again, this is essentially a fire I was cooking over. I still like being able to cook on a fire, with no mess afterwards. You've done your mentor well, and thank you for sharing this neat little stove with us!