Originally Posted By: dougwalkabout
I hope they've improved it -- a lot. Last time I tried the Coghlan's product (over 10 years ago) it was worse than useless.

Nothing at all like the British military hexamine cubes I bought at a surplus store. That stuff lit easily and burned hot.


That's something I'm always concerned about: Will the "off brand" stuff be any good? All I can tell you is it's worked well for me. Since this was a different batch than I used last summer, I just tested one of the fresh tablets. I thought I'd share my results.

I used my Kershaw Scallion to shave a bit of the hexamine onto to the top of a large inverted stainless steel doggie dish. It's crumbly stuff and cuts/scrapes easily into fine powder. I wanted to see if I could light this stuff with my (fairly recently aquired) BlastMatch. Now, I'm still a little awkward using it since it's new to me and I'm more used to a regular firesteel (with the Firesteel.com com being the best IMO). It did take me maybe 10 strikes to light the dust but to be fair, about 1/2 the time I forget you have to push down on the striker tab really hard with your thumb to engage the striker. At any rate light it did, and I was easily able to light the tablet with the burning dust. Not bad.

I noticed this batch doesn't smell quite as "fishy" as Esbit, although it's close. It does feel exactly the same but doesn't stink as bad. Of course, it could be just because there's less of it. It quickly gets burning, and I noted that the flames off the small tab were over 3" high for around 5-6 minutes. It was burning strongly enough that you could probably cook on it at minute seven. From that point on the flame dropped off a bit, with flame strong enough to light stuff up til about 9 & 1/2 minutes. It finally flamed out at almost exactly 10 minutes. Unlike Esbit there was a little bit of solid matter left but not very much.

Overall I think that's pretty decent for the size. The tabs measure exactly 7 grams on my kitchen scale. That's good burning time for 7 grams of fuel, IMO. They're easy to light and burn very well. I would encourage anyone interested in these to shoot me a PM- I'd be willing to send a few of you a couple tablets to test out. I don't wanna build my survival gear around sub-standard products, and several of us testing under safe conditions is better than just me!
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“I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” —Richard Feynman