Esbit burner testing

That looks great so far though Dan! Very promising.

The size of your vents makes me wonder if I could produce something smaller but similar, using a fancee feast can, to use with one or two 4g tabs. My old alcohol fancee feast can weighs about 6.8grams and has lasted a very long time. Flames even with a 4g tab would probably escape more out the top and then be more affected by wind than your design, as the volume is smaller.

If I get the bottom holes right with the dremel, it should still hold in the Esbit juice well enough so that it can burn at the end.

Jeebus I need more time in my life so I can tinker more easily with such things

Not if you use a baseplate, ie flashing or foil.Robert.

Adam, “Make” the time this weekend :-) your idea should be doable using the 4 gram esbit. The can is 1.5″ tall. Dremels cut fast, won’t take long at all ;-)

Stormin, base plate is one extra piece, too much weight ;-)

Back from the drawing board and came up with this:

I bought two cans of fancee feast to try. Also bought a couple of extra freeze dried meals to do tests with (large 175g dry weight “double” serves, which is what I’m aiming for).

I think I can make time tomorrow in the work lab to do the dremeling, and then do some tests on my back porch tomorrow night.

Yes, height of can should hopefully be fine for a good burn with the small tabs.

Did a test this evening. Fancee Feast can with a ring of small drill holes down low and two rings of small holes up high. 4g esbit, 250ml of water in Vargo Bot 700.

Failed to get to boil but got pretty hot (don’t have a thermometer). Burn was slow, went for over 15minutes! It seemed to burn quite cleanly, but at the end there was a rather solid white crust of residue (in exact shape of the tab) on the bottom. Pretty sure I need to give it more air flow, so will put more holes in it when I get a chance (might not be until next week, busy work week). I’ll probably also try burning the tabs on their side, to give the burn more surface area, speed it up.

I think the fancee feast works well though otherwise. The flames don’t escape from it, and I can leave my hands quite close to the stove underneath the pot and can’t feel much heat. So the heat is mostly going into the pot, which is good. If I can get more speed out of the tab burn that would be great. I think its burning so slow that the water is cooling before it quite gets a chance to boil. It doesn’t bother me if I don’t quite get a boil with 250ml of water; with 300-450ml of water in freeze dried meal it will still warm up to a nice temp.

Oh yeah, water temp was probably about 15C, outside air temp only about 8C…its cold here at the moment. But this is a good test condition for what I will use it in.

Oh yes, the drilled can weighs 6.5grams.

Yes, more than 15 min for a 4g tab (!) with no flames coming out of that tiny can definitely means more airflow is needed. I’ve messed around with a few of those cans and I think there might be a problem with the distance between flame and pot.

Lately I am experimenting with the plain ol’ Esbit Tri-wing with a simple Ti foil windscreen and it seems to be doing about as well as anything else with the Toaks 550.

I plan to test the idea of adding the FF14 to the tri-wing, making the side vents a little larger since the edge of the Tri-wing’s fuel tray blocks them a bit.

I thought I was done with Esbit but you guys keep resurrecting this thread and pulling me back in!

My 1¢

(Jon Fong is a bona fide expert so my opinion is certainly worth no more than half of his. )

You might be onto something with the flame. I thought it might be too close before I tried but, remembering (from last night) how the flame spiked when I took the BOT 700 off periodically for a quick look (ie when airflow was not an issue), and I realise that it wasn’t very high with those 4g tabs. So, the pot not really inside the flame, which I recall is the optimum (ie the top part of the flame should be touching pot…).

Once I’ve got a better amount of airflow involved and I’ve experimented with tabs on their side, I can try putting something in to raise the tab a few mm. A piece of folded Ti or similar isn’t the end of the world. Toying with the idea of making a tiny cuben stuff sack for it anyway (can hold a few tabs and a mini bic too), so such a piece would be contained together and not lost easily.

Adam, looking forward to your experiments!

My idea of using the FF14 with the Tri-wing is a bust…. the FF14 base is far too large for the Tri-wing tray.

No worries, it works fine with just the windscreen. I have some of the 5g tabs on order and will find out soon enough if 2 of them will boil 2 cups.

I have an easy solution for the Fancey Feast can. It’s an esbit holder that controls the burn rate and directs the flames to the bottom of the pot. Will have a video of it tomorrow. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained ;-)

I took the time and did it this evening. Will give dimensions of the esbit tray tomorrow. The pyrex bowl worked well to view the flame pattern. Temp of the water got up to 157 degrees. F/69.4444 C using 1 four gram esbit.

Brilliant using the Pyrex bowl to observe flame patterns!

— Rex

Nice Dan!

Agree, the pyrex bowl is clever for being able to see the flame pattern!

The pyrex would be terrible for testing actual effectiveness of the stove (max temp of water) as it is so heavy with so much glass mass to absorb the heat, but that’s not what its for here.

The esbit hold looks like a good idea to push the flame higher. Should be easy for me to make out of something lying around.

Your holes in the fancee feast are significantly larger than what I have. I’ll go nuts with the dremel at some point in future days.

Great idea with the Pyrex bowl!

With the bowl in place it appears that only the ends of the Esbit tab are burning. It’d interesting to see the results with only the tab in the FF can.

10 years ago I used glass pots to determine what height a pot support should be when designing a stove. I made an adjustable tool to raise and lower the pot. Read the thread at my website bplite.com

Device to determin proper distance burner to potstand( Tue Oct 16, 2007)

http://bplite.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=263&sid=599442d5965cec3da9c102e43121ba00

The 4 gram esbit tray in the video was made of .005 x 1.5″ wide stainless steel shim stock, half hard.

I folded it into the shape of a U, Photo is crude but you get the jist of it

Love it!

Impressive, Dan. I like the kit with the 18×4 gm tabs. I have one of those jet lighters, but it just stopped working, for no discernible reason. Even when refilled with fuel. So I don’t trust that particular lighter. Also I wonder if the U channel prevents the Esbit tab from burning freely in the midsection? It looked so thru the Pyrex, but not when you took the bowl off. .??? And doesn’t the melted Esbit flow off the channel, or doesn’t that matter? Though the other type tray would take care of that, of course.

Jet lighters and other butane lighters need to have the air purged from the fuel reservoir once in a while. The pieso models need to have the points made sure they are adjusted properly. If the point of the rod touches the wall of the lighter it won’t spark. If the rod point oxidizes it won’t spark.  The lighter in the video has a small cap on a chain to cover the sparking rod to prevent damage and oxidation. I’ll get a link to the reviews given for the lighter and you can read the pros and cons of it. 339 reviews

I purchased 30 and all of them worked when tested.

I don’t think the esbit melt flows off the holder due to incoming air. Even if the melt did come off it would go into a depression of the Fancey Feast can and be consumed there. The top edges of the holder get red hot and i suspect it adds to the complete combustion of the esbit. There is nothing left of the esbit on the tray or in the can/support. A tray for the esbit can be made from a soup can if you have a stout pair of scissors to cut it with. I used a paper punch to make the slots in the can. Slots allow the flames to go out and up to touch the bottom of the pot quickly.

I’m super busy with projects around the house that need to be finished before the end of summer. Not enough time to experiment further with esbit. I started putting some kits together but get sidetracked easily.

There is a lot of heat generated by the 4 gram tablet so I don’t think the aluminum can will last very long in the configuration that I did with the slots.

All hail Master 33* Dan Y, Esbit R&D Extraordinaire!

Robert, my brother was Grand Master 33* of his lodge. it’s only fitting I follow somewhat in his footsteps to excel in something LOL  I watch water boil with great interest LOL There are signs and tokens associated with proper execution of fire principles. ;-)

On a recent trip I accidentally left the Trail Designs GramCracker sitting on my desk. I fashioned a u-shaped holder for a 14 gram Esbit tablet out of the aluminum(?) Ti-Tri floor.

The walls weren’t straight, so the tablet had a few mm of air below it – kind of suspended in air. Boiled water just fine for four nights, didn’t leave much ash or residue.

Perhaps exploring a wider range of Esbit stove designs could be fruitful.

— Rex

Rex, thanks for sharing that. Necessity is the mother of invention :-)

It came to me in a early morning dream LOL. I should make a titanium concentrator(see videos) with bread pan corners and incorporate it into the latest one piece titanium stove design.

Strong flame!

Dan, I am sure you are way ahead of me, but I did have a moment of clarity. Your U channel intensifies the flame in a long rectangular plan shape, but I wonder if a consideration should be/could be the transition from the base rectangle of the Esbit tab to the circular base of the top of the stove/bottom of the pot. So the geometry would be widening as the channel ascends, from rectangular horizontal cross-section at the tab level to circular horizontal cross-section to the top. So you are shaping the flame from tab to pot base..?