I have bought a Coleman 400A stove with a clogged generator and without the cleaning tip lever and its appropriate components. I have fabricated everything including a new generator tube and flame control mechanism and voila
Yes. Same as the original generator. You will need a special tool (not expensive) that holds the tube firmly and with a conical press, you can obtain the enlarged tube end.
Dude why are we not talking more about this. Could you share details on what you did ?!? Pics in the light?
@okerol re your "I have fabricated everything including a new generator tube and flame control mechanism and voila" WELL DONE This, for me, is looking like best post of the month. I join those wanting to see more AND share the challenges with your prototype. The process to create a prototypes almost always gets tweaked. thank you
I have had explained this earlier in more detail in CCF's Collections: "Restored Pieces and Before & After Projects" part. The topic name is "Re building a coleman 400A generator". I don't know whether I can use same pictures due to copyright issues. If you have difficulties seeing it I will try to upload here different photos.
The generator tube is a copper tube with a 5mm of diameter. Brass tubes are harder to work on it. My generator tube is a tube made of plain copper. I have not seen any inconveniency so far. Inside the generator tube, there is a straight steel or iron wire having 1.5mm of diameter (sorry for the units, I have written exactly what I have bought, I don't know their inch counterpart). Around this wire, I wound another steel wire (or soft iron may be) having 1mm of diameter. This is not a spring made of stainless steel. These wires are soft, you can find them in an hardware shop. That is it. 400A generator is simpler in terms of evaporator section. Newer 533's or 400B's generators consist of two brass or copper tubes, one is the outside tube and one is innerside tube (the inner tube is used instead of 1.5mm wire. In this tube, slides the prickier wire. I don't know its diameter since I haven't fabricated one yet)
You can adjust the distances with a flat screw driver when needed. You will insert it where the gap is small then by turning the screw driwer you can equalize this gaps slightly.
After heavily using my stove with gasoline only, I have finally encountered the famous clogging issue. My stove has started with yellow flames and after many left-right rotation of the cleaning tip lever, blue flames has resumed back. Wondering what causes this issue, I have quickly dismounted my generator and opened the jet orifice. Everything was clean! I have not seen something to clog the jet. I have poured alcohol in my generator and it dripped at the other side as expected. I have mounted everything back and my stove has cold started with pure blue flames.
On a suitcase 425 stove (diff stove diff generator) I ran one tank of reg gas through it after just cleaning the generator and pricker and took it apart again and saw a one inch long section of the pricker that had collected a sort of sooty carbon deposit on it. It wasn’t bad and the stove burned as good as ever but if that was my experience with one tank of gasoline then I dare extrapolate that after enough tanks of pump gasoline that sort of deposit could amass to a thick enough specimen that it would mess with fuel vaporization and/or fuel flow and that that is what causes performance degradation after running enough tanks of pulp gasoline. I’ve seen a thread where someone’s 400A or equivalent generator was irreparably clogged and they cut it open to find a small chunk of carbon deposit that blocked flow and that he couldn’t get rid of (short of cutting it open). perhaps with early enough cleaning you can dissolve some or all of the said carbon deposits so they don’t cause any problems but IDK.
