Korpijaakko

It’s been a bit quiet in the blog as I’m using most of my spare time doing expedition preparations. Last weekend was spent weighting, mixing and packing food for three-week expedition. I’ll write more about my diet before leaving but here is a teaser pick:

Most of the food for two people for a three-week expedition. Missing from the picture: more butter, more hard rye bread and load of bacon.

Today I had some time to test stoves as earlier this winter I was able to get my hands on couple of old classic Optimus Hiker 111Ts. These are nice stoves with good power control and very quiet compared to modern roarer-style liquid fuel stoves. And they are very hard to find so I’m happy that I got two of them. I’ll later modify other burner to fit Trangia and use external fuel bottle and it’ll serve as my winter camping stove if takin only one stove as a cooker box for one stove is overkill and heavy. The Trangia-modification is called Ultima Naltio and is explained here.

Optimus Hiker 111T on test run. A classic piece of beauty.

previously I have modified a Primus Omnifuel multifuel stove to fit in Trangia and used it while winter camping. Today I got crazy idea about trying to use Trangia butane/propane gas burner with white gas! The burner is made by Primus. It has a vaporizer tube required to vaporize liquid fuel and it comes with 0,37mm Primus nozzle that is also used in Omnifuel to burn white-gas and it fits to Primus Ergopump that comes with the Omnifuel stove. The burner also looks quite a bit similar to MSR Simmerlite stove, so why not give it a try?

Testing Trangia gas burner with white gas. Original Trangia burner doing the priming under the base.

I filled a fuel bottle with little bit of white gas, twisted it to the burner and opened the valve. White gas showered out from the nozzle as it is supposed to. I shut the valve and used the original Trangia burner to prime the stove as the propane burner doesn’t have any cup for priming fuel, though it would be easy to attach one to it. After thoroughful priming I opened the main valve and the burner lit!

The problems started soon after igniting the stove. The burner seemed to work but there was minor leakage where the flexible fuel line is attached to the burner and the leaking white gas ignited so I decided to stop the experiment. I will test later if the joint leaks also when pressurized with cold water or used with propane but until then using a propane burner with white gas seems like a viable idea. The stove just needs to have proper sized nozzle, vaporizer tube, suitable burner head and no rubber or plastic parts near the burner head. I think that for example MSR Windpro or Edelrid Opilio might work very well. They would make reasonably prized and light multifuel stoves that could be used with butane/propane in summer and with white-gas in winter.

Have you tried to use butane/propane stove with white gas? Do you see some reasons why it might not work? Is there even any idea in trying?

Disclaimer: All testing and using of gear against manufacturer instructions are done at your own risk!