Titanium JetBoil Sol — CAUTION

"I for one appreciate HJ bringing this issue to my attention – I'd rather know to be alert to such a possibility than be surprised by it on some dark and stormy night. Yeah, HJ gets a little excited about anything related to stoves – that is maybe to be expected in someone with his avocation. My theory is that, like a baby duckling, he imprinted on the first thing he ever saw, but his parents had just left the room and he spied an Optimus 8R nearby." -David Thomas

@ David, you have no idea how true your statement is. Hikin' Jim IS the stove monsta!
Anyone willing to bring 60 stoves to a gathering of BPL folks and demonstrate each and every one of them is an awesome guy in my book!

Here is Hikin' Jim at a BPL Gathering doing what he loves.. explaining the characteristics and specifications of STOVES!
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Hikin' Jim is an enthusiastic and tireless teacher. He is the exaclty right person to bring this issue up and hopefully Jet Boil responds to his thread here on BPL. The dude loves stoves, from the Svea 123 to the Jet Boil in this thread and every thing in between.. even the lowly Cat Can Alky.

Maybe we can get Jim to do some destructive testing/demos next year?!? Did you see that fireball on Sat. night?

I sure did see that fireball! I also saw Jack burn his eye-lashes off with his Tinfoil and tea candle oven.
Fire is so cool!
I once burned my eyelashes off like that. I had a mis-fire with my hair-spray powered PVC pipe Potato cannon. When I unscrewed the end I saw a small blue flame in the bottom of tha cannon a millisecond before it advanced up the tube and took the hair off my face!
Kinda looked like i had a bad sunburn for a few days and it itched a little.
Nothing quite like launching a Potato 200 yards with hairspray, plastic pipe, and a piezoelectric bar-b-que ignitor though.
It was hella worth losing a little hair.

Matthew: I always dodged fast enough when the Svea 123 flared up to save my eyebrows. And I've been powering the various snowball cannons with compressed air rather than VO5.

But the last time a layer of propane on the ground ignited (there's a sensation of the heat traveling up one's leg as the leg hairs ignite, followed by a really bad smell), I knew exactly what had happened, because it wasn't the first time.

Maybe we can get Jim to do some destructive testing/demos next year?!?

Heh, heh, don’t tempt me. You don’t know how tempted I am to boil over a JetBoil Sol right now just to see if I can replicate what happened to the one that prompted the original post in this thread.

Next year being a ways a way, I present the following: Gas canisters go BOOM.

Did you see that fireball on Sat. night?

Well, do you want your white gas stove primed or don’t you? ;)

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

David Thomas wrote: > Yeah, HJ gets a little excited about anything related to stoves – that is maybe to be expected in someone with his avocation. My theory is that, like a baby duckling, he imprinted on the first thing he ever saw, but his parents had just left the room and he spied an Optimus 8R nearby.

lol. As a matter of fact we did have an Optimus 8R when I was growing up.

Some people (my wife) think that it has happened to my daughter, now 2, shown here at a few months old with a Svea 123.

There aren’t too many two year olds that can say “windscreen” and “alcohol” and “fuel pump” like my daughter, lol.

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

Some people should never be parents!! California Child Welfare has screwed up yet again! Where are the case workers when we need them??? :)

Well, Jim, you got your daughter to carry your stove and pot…now for the rest of your gear. She's 2? Sheesh, I'd think she should be carrying *at least* your bag, mat, shelter, and stove.

Hey HJ, lets see some extreme testing, boil overs, debris path of an exploding canister, which canister has the furthest path etc. :)
Duane

@ Iceaxe Replace potato with fuel soaked tennis ball for nighttime fun. Remember PVC shrapnel is no fun.

Real interested in how JB handles this.

I just saw that the original thread (titled: Orange thingy on JB sol ti) reporting a problem was removed by Ryan Jordan. Curious about the reasoning behind that, and about whether this thread will disappear as well.

-David

HJ: Your daughter is the one on the right? Or left?

I met someone two months ago named Svea and I DIDN'T say, "Like the stove?", assuming she got that a lot. But maybe only from middle-aged backpackers?

One could do a variation of Sarah Palin's kid-naming (Piper, Willow, Cessna, Sockeye, Glacier, Thumper, Salmonberry, etc) with backpacking gear: Svea, Trangia, Scott, Robbins, Kayadyn, Addidas, etc. Then on the first day of kindergarten as the teacher called out, "Thermarest Jones?". . .

I saw a birth announcement locally for "James Tiberius Smith". I sure hope BOTH parents were Trekkies!

OK. Based on the input, questions, comments, etc, I’ve revised the post. Really revised it. Here’s a link if you’d like to have a look: Titanium JetBoil Sol — Caution — REVISED.

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

I'll add my 2 cents to this: If I pay $150 for a stove and it cannot resist a little spill of some ramen, I'm sure as hell sending it back.

So now you say it might have an 'occasional' problem. No, I think you should simply say that there have been a couple of cases of 'blank' happening and you are investigating with JetBoil (I really hope you are doing this). Otherwise it sounds like all JetBoil Ti's will exhibit this anomaly occasionally. Which is simply not the case.

It would be simpler to have JetBoil put on the "hangtag" and on the box and in the Manual, the JetBoil is for boiling water.

Do not fill above the fill-line.
Do not use a windscreen.
etc.

with the international "orange circle-diagonal slash" symbol.

Then Sarah Kirkconnell "Trail Cooking" could advertise JetBoil BIG TIME.

More serious, perhaps, I have never got my JetBoil to have a low-heat setting. I turn the flame down low, and in real-world conditions (outdoors), the flame blows out…

So now you say it might have an ‘occasional’ problem. No, I think you should simply say that there have been a couple of cases of ‘blank’ happening and you are investigating with JetBoil (I really hope you are doing this). Otherwise it sounds like all JetBoil Ti’s will exhibit this anomaly occasionally. Which is simply not the case.

Hmm. I’m not sure that the meaning was unclear, but just in case I have added the following:

By “occasional” I mean that very few units seem to have been impacted. I do not mean that all units will occasionally have a problem!

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

> More serious, perhaps, I have never got my JetBoil to have a low-heat setting. I turn the flame down low, and in real-world conditions (outdoors), the flame blows out…

The flame adjustment when on low seems really tricky to me. Sometimes I turn the flame up on mine, and the flame diminishes (!).

I haven’t tried it outdoors yet, but cooked this morning on a Jetboil Sol (aluminum version):

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

Hopefully some of the controversy surrounding this post has died down a bit.

I did want to address one semi-related topic brought up in the midst of this:

You have ads all over your blog, you’re obviously trying to make money.

Yes, there are ads on my blog. I put them there after I lost my job in January. However, note that for the first year of my blog’s existence, there were no ads at all.

As for revenue, my blog pays me less than $2.00 per day. Today, I have earned the princely sum of twenty three cents. I figure the revenue from the blog covers fuel costs, but not too much else. My blog does nothing in terms of supporting me or my family.

If money is the motivation behind my blog, then I’m one incredibly illogical individual. Perhaps this will sound implausible, but I started blogging simply to share my stoves. During the course of blogging I realized how much need there is for accurate information concerning stoves. I have tried, with admittedly varying degrees of success, to put together something of a compendium on stoves.

My blog thrives mostly on borrowed equipment and my almost entirely uncompensated time. The BushBuddy recently featured belongs to Christian D, a member of BPL. The JetBoil Sol I posted a cooking report on belongs to Will L. The Ti-Tri Caldera Cone belongs to Randy N. Many of my posts before I lost my job relied on equipment purchased through the Gear Swap here on BPL.

By the way, the majority of the posts on my blog are not linked to here on BPL. I do occasionally highlight a post I think is important or of particular interest, but particularly lately, most of my blog posts have no corresponding post on BPL.

Just for the record.

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

Did you ever hear back from JetBoil with respect to a potential recall, etc?

I knew that HJ. I'm surprised you were called out on this HJ, as other members keep repeating items they sell for the benefit of some of us and cottage industry owners chip in to keep members updated on specials and shipping updates. Double standard? On other forums, members post links to their blogs and even post musings/quotes from their blogs. For your trying to help, you have been reprimanded as some felt fit on occasion, things happen, so we see you are not perfect. You're an adult, you take your chances.
You should have an addition to your collection tomorrow I believe. :)

Your Stovie buddy in the mountains,
Duane

Damn, I was all set on getting a jetboil ti, and now I don't know what to do. The last thing that I need is for my stove to meltdown….sigh. Has anyone heard any further info on this matter?

well just get the aluminium one for 1oz more and call it a day if you don't trust the ti version. or wait what jetboil has to say about it.

Typically, the problems that I’m aware of (admittedly, I don’t know of every case) occurred when the instructions were not heeded. It’s worth taking a look at JetBoil’s instructions, particularly the orange sheet, in Appendix IV on my blog post. If those instructions feel too confining for what you want to do with the stove, then maybe the aluminum version would be the better choice.

There have been a few, very few, (two) problems reported when just boiling water where the heat exchanger melted.

If you buy the Ti version, use with caution so that you don’t damage the unit, but I don’t think the JetBoil Sol Ti is dangerous.

HJ
Adventures In Stoving

well just get the aluminium one for 1oz more and call it a day if you don’t trust the ti version. or wait what jetboil has to say about it.

The specs on the JetBoil site say that there’s a two ounce difference, 8.5oz for the Sol Ti and 10.5 oz for the aluminum Sol. If I’m reading the site correctly, those weights include only the pot, cozy, lid, and burner. The pot support for non-JetBoil pots, the canister “legs,” and the cup that attaches to the bottom of the burner are not included.

Of course you can modify those numbers (8.5oz vs 10.5oz) a little if you leave behind the cozy and such.

HJ
Adventures In Stoving