Canister Stoves

We an get canisters a lot cheaper here in Oz, not in the tiny 110gram size tho; but to do so you have to buy in cartons of 24.

We often do a group buy of a carton and share.

$8:95 retail is a 300% profit and a rip-off so I refill my 100gram canisters from big ones

Rather amusing is that on both eBay and now apparently Amazon, the Chinese call anything made of brass ‘copper’. Do they have a ban on the word ‘brass’ perhaps? Very strange. I have also seen them saying that tungsten carbide cutters are made of ‘tungsten steel’, which is both wrong and very confusing. Ignorance.
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Two cautions are appropriate about using those adapters.

First off, the cheap canisters do NOT contain a 30/70% propane/butane mix: they contain just butane. The butane may be an unspecified mix of n-butane and iso-butane, but there is little or no propane to give you that extra oomph in cold weather. You could be badly caught out.

Second, those butane canisters are designed to be used lying flat. They have an internal rigid ‘dip tube’ which goes maybe half way up the inside of the canister. If you try to move the liquid fuel into your screw-thread canister the way they show (butane canister inverted), you will only get about half of the contents before you hit gas. This could be expensive and frustrating.

To get most of the liquid fuel out of a butane can you need to have it horizontal and with the notch downwards. But if you try to do by tilting both canisters horizontal you lose the benefit of gravity feed. Then it gets tricky.

Technical explanation re orientation: when you put one of the cheap butane cans in a table-top stove the notch has to go upwards. The dip tube is then right at the top of the can about half way along it, getting a gas feed. They are all made that way.

I have seen ‘blowtorch’ accessories to go on these butane cans. The instructions say to run the blowtorch very low for about a minute: this lets the metal body heat up so it can vaporise the liquid fuel before it reaches the jet.

Cheers