SHOW AND TELL ? ?

a few minutes ago i sent another member a PM about gas lamp
and stove safety..it struck me that as adults--i hope--that
we don't have access to real hands-on,show and tell opportunitys that say boy/girl scouts would have in the use of
some of this gear..and that some or many of the bad results
that people might have are from lack of hands on training
that you are not going to get when you walk out of a big box
store with a new gas lamp..REI and other outdoor shops will
sometimes have sandtables for demos but not everyone has
one near by..tradeshows are the same..far from home and not
often...so--has anyone thought about informal meets where
some of our "talent" could show and share..not camp outs
with a BOB but just a drive..less than a hour say..to a
well known local park to spread out some gear and light
a few stoves..or demo your sparklight..??



WHY SHOULD I WAIT FOR THE PRE-HEAT TO FINISH!!!



oh--i see......

haha, thats stove experians is just like you said an experians issue. Proper preheating and you will be fine. Try getting experians outside, somewhere safe first, though.

I just come back from a short weekend trip with somebody else, testing kit and stuff. We discoverd that it takes about 2 hours and 7 cleaning jobs to filter 1.8 liter of mud in to water, with a MSR miniworks. We also confirmed or suspision about contaminating the clean and dirty side, when cleaning the ceramic. It's highly likely, so we end up boiling the water too...

I'm also going to a bushcraft meetup with 70 others, testing, learning and trying our kit and skills.

Canoedogs,
If you are prehaeting your whisperlight in the first photo you are doing it wrong.

When you preheat that stove you open the fuel line (after pumping) just enough to get a tiny amount of fuel in the primer pan which is the little cup under the burner.
You light the fuel and let it burn for as long as it can. After a few minutes you have heated the fuel ine and vaporized the fuel.

Now you can open the valve and allow fuel to the burner. You might be able to get it to light from the priming flame below but you may have to light the burner itself.

When you light the burner, only turn the value open to the point where you go from a blue flame to an orange flame. Back it off until you get a blue flame. After a minute or two you should be able to open the valve 100% and get cooking with a blue flame.

You do not light the burner to prime the stove this will cause you to burn liquid white gas (orange flame)instead of vaporized white gas (blue flame) this will clog the burner with soot and clog your stove.

The flare up in the second photo is the pressure in fuel bottle shooting liquid fuel out of the burner before the stove is properly primed.

By the way in the first photo it looks like you have priming paste; you don't NEED it for that stove. Simply prime the way I described.


Sorry to highjack the thread; yes it would be fun and useful to meet up with ETS friends and play with our gear. You can both learn and teach at a gathering like that.

Yes, you can preheat a gasoline stove with gasoline, but paste of spirits burns much cleaner and it's safer to handle. I personnally prefer to prime mine stoves with spirits. Done properly you will have no soot at all, leaving everything much cleaner.

i only use gasoline as a preheat, when mine tiny bottle of spirits runs out.

I'm going to a cooking / food course end april, which includes a section about stoves. If i find more tricks, i will post it. I doubt it, though...

No you are supposed to prime with the fuel but you can use priming paste, You have it backwards.

The whole idea is that you do not need a separate item to carry just to prime the stove like the stoves that preceeded the whisperlight.

If you use as little fuel as possible to prime the stove you will get very little soot on the stove and only on the underside of the burner which is easily wiped off.

If you are experienced with this stove it is entirely safe to handle while priming with only the fuel and do not need the priming paste.

I have owned the same Whisperlight Intl. for over 10 years now and I have sold, repaired, cleaned and taught customers how to use this stove and all other MSR stoves for more that 7 years.

well i didn't say that paste should be the primairy methode, i just ment that it isn't wrong to do so. For the reasons i stated earlier. There are plenty of people that prefer a extra little bottle, so than don't get soot everywhere. But we are getting off topic fast...

I have a whisperlite that I've used for years. One winter trip, I had found out that the leather pump cup had dired out. I had nothing to lube it with. So, I chewed it for a minute. Worked fine after that
I've never had flare up with my whisperlite, to any real noticeable degree. Not like in the pic, anyway. If people dont want to read & follow directions, well, pain is a good teacher

So, um, did it taste like fuel?

If everything is working right, it should taste more like air...

notice the blue band on the Sigg bottle..thats for kerosene..
i got this stove on Ebay as the international model,it also
came in a box marked as such..it fired up and ran fine
on coleman fuel..i have and use the old MSR GK..the one with
the solid pipe and not the flex one..and run it on both fuels..
sooooo--after running the new wisperlite on gas i got out
the kero bottle..gave it a good pre-heat and turned up the
valve with those results..big shock...not the international.
a hard look at both of them on the web and i could see the
difference...rip off???..maybe the seller was honest and
he was sold a bill of goods?? anyway it was a good buy.
i cleaned off the soot and it went on a canoe trip as
a back up to my Peak One..



this little stove is an Optimus 96..it's an old kero burner
that breaks down into several bits and fits in a small tin
box..its no longer made but this runs like the day it came
from the factory in Sweden..i just use this for brew-ups on
day hikes as spilled kero is a nasty mess in a pack..
i pre-heat this with alcohol..

My old MSR XGK (with the solid fuel line) required a change of jets from Coleman to kero, does your Whisperlite? Did you???

I'd love to host a show and tell for Houston/Texas area ETS members. We've set up meetings at local gun shows before but they are conductive to lighting stoves/building debris shelters/testing homemade generator systems/etc...

There are some great areas nearby wild areas that would be perfect for this sort of event. They are filled with edible plants and animals, safe water (bacteria but no chemicals) as well as the occasional dump pile to scavange materials.

Any of our Texas members interested?

-Blast

OBG..
change jets??..the old MSR seemed to run on gas and kero
without changing anything..it came with another jet but i
thought that was a spare...i'll have to dig out the instruction sheet thats around "somewhere"..jet change on the
whisperlite???..it looks like the problem there was that
i was sold the wrong model...



this is the GK on kero..no jet changeing..the yellow
flame got more blue as the stove ran and heated up..

No, the pump cup doesnt come into contact with fuel, it generates the pressure inside the bottle.

The old style multistove fuels didnt have to change jets, just had to clean em if they burned crappy stuff. Until they came out with the shaker jet system. Its been so long since I've used my whisperlite...do they still use the shaker jet?

Amazing, my GXK had the different jets for different fuels. I gave it to my step-son, and he has it about a thousand miles away, so I can't go check right now...

hmm... massaging the cup with your fingers works too you know!

Now you're getting kind of kinky...