Hi Friends,

I decided to change things a bit tonight and test another "new to me" stove, this time it's an Optimus 8R Hunter that I bought off e-Bay in March.

I was working near one of my favorite campsites beside a small lake trout lake, so I stopped there for supper.

Here is the set-up, I found a small shed moose antler earlier in the day so I used it and some flat rocks as a partial windscreen.



This stove is very similar in burner design to the Svea 123R that I have been using for the past 2 days, but I found it much harder to heat-prime it to generate pressure in the tank (used Coghlin's priming paste). I have a small Midi pressure pump for the 8R and should have brought it along to speed-up this step.

Supper was boil-in-a-bag Cheese/Beef Tortillini, it wasn't bad.

I then put 500ml (about 2 cups) of water on the stove in a covered pot, to make a hot drink. Granted my windscreen was not the best, but in this realistic test it took 7 minutes for the water to come to a rolling boil, that seems a little long by today's high-tech stove standards. The stove is also very noisy when burning, sounds like a little helicopter!

I am having fun doing these field stove/meal tests, I think the next one will be propane fueled.

Later,

Mike