Home Made Gear?

I think I should look for a wider shorter pot, will be more efficient - less heat lost up the side of the pot.

Do anyone perhaps know where i can buy a Trangia stove?

I field tested my penny-stove setup yesterday on a day hike in Suikerbosrand, with a fair bit of gusty wind. It didn't get to a rolling boil, even after about 13 minutes of burn time, after which it ran out of fuel (didn't fill it full). Water was more than hot enough for a cup of tea though (or to rehydrate a meal). I boiled 500ml.

I received my Trangia stove yesterday and tested it last night. It works like a charm. It cokked a half liter of cold tap water in just under 8 minutes.

Now for the real test this coming weekend. Will let you know.

Asterix wrote: I received my Trangia stove yesterday and tested it last night. It works like a charm. It cokked a half liter of cold tap water in just under 8 minutes.

Now for the real test this coming weekend. Will let you know.

Great, good luck with it. Have you weighed the stove? Have you considered making your own version of the stove? Its not too difficult with a couple of colddrink cans, and you'd probably get good weight savings.

The stove including its pots and pan as well as its wind shield weights 725 grams, which i consider not to bad.

I have tested the can stove andd this is also working.

Thank you so much to everyone who posted information about making DIY alcohol stoves on this thread! I have experimented with a few different designs of stove and windshield. At the moment my favourite is the cat can stove with a windshield made from half of a Frisco coffee tin.



I tested it out today in a decent amount of wind (I added a few loosely-spaced rocks around the windshield as the wind was pretty strong at times), and got the following results:






40ml of Methylated Spirits boiled 750ml of cold tap water in 7 minutes and 3 seconds, and continued to burn (without the pot on) for 2 minutes and 2 seconds.

It seems that most people on this thread have been boiling 500ml of water, so I tried that too:


40ml of Methylated Spirits boiled 500ml of cold tap water in 5 minutes and 44 seconds, and continued to burn (without the pot on) for 3 minutes.

The weight of the cat can stove is about 10 grams (my scale isn't super accurate with such light items), and the weight of the Frisco windshield is 80 grams. The weight of my entire cook kit (pot, lid, mug, stove, windshield, lighter, stuff sack and 300 ml of fuel) is 680 grams.

The Frisco tin is probably fairly heavy in comparison with a tin foil windshield, but it does have some nice features:
1. It provides really great stability, so you are less likely to knock the stove/pot combination over accidentally.
2. It does seem to reflect some heat back towards the pot, as the cooking time with a foil windshield was several minutes longer.
3. It 'nests' around the outside of my K-way cooking pot perfectly.

4. It controls the flames from the stove pretty effectively. In fact, you don't see much flame at all once the pot is on. All of this means that the plastic covered handles of my pot are no longer being burnt or melted.

Of course, there are some downsides too:
1. It is heavier than a tin foil windshield.
2. It is bulkier than a tin foil windshield.
3. It is probably more effort to make than a tin foil windshield as you need to cut the tin down to size, drill holes in the bottom and then 'link' the holes using tin snips to make slots (I found that slots worked more effectively than round holes). If you are worried about gear/fingers snagging on cut edges (as I was), then you will have to put in even more effort to smooth down the sharp bits.

I will probably be taking this stove/windshield with me on our December 3-day hike

I took my Frisco tin/cat tin cooking arrangement on our December long weekend hike, and it performed wonderfully. I boiled water for my supper on both nights (once on the escarpment and once near the Mnweni River) without any problems.



The one issue that I did have is that the methylated spirits leaked out of its bottle like crazy
I eventually had the bottle inside seven ziplock bags, and by the time we ended our hike there was a little methylated spirits in every single bag. Have other people had this irritating experience? Is methylated spirits just very prone to get out of its container? At first I thought that it was entirely the fault of the bottle that I used, but the fact that the spirits made its way out of all seven ziplock bags makes me wonder...

I am now considering solid fuel alternatives - has any one had experience using solid fuels? I am tempted to try bits of firelighter actually (since I already have them), but I know there are other solid fuels out there too. Any suggestions?

I've had a similiar issue with various bottles that I've tried. Eventually I managed to get a Trangia bottle (www.trangia.se/english/2917.trangia_accessories.html), which those clever Swedes have designed specifically for this. I bought it at Mountain Mail Order (their last 1 apparently) when they were still in Tokai. It really is a great product with zero leakage.