Oh, no doubt making sure it never runs out of fuel is best practice, but I've boiled water for rice and fried steaks for 4 and managed to run out of fuel. I've also cooked breakfast a time or two and forgotten to fill 'er up after the night before. No argument about that. But the wick doesn't "scorch"; at least my wick doesn't..... 8)
The wick being pretty close to where the burner mates to the tank, I think it's pretty obvious the scorching business is widely exaggerated. Just listen to what people stick in there, ptfe-tape, loc-tite and what not. Doesn't seem to me to reach scorching temperature. Someone somewhere stated that wick charring is more likely associated with priming a dry stove. That explanation sticks with me at least. Note to OP: Not all 123R are crap quality. Only the production of the recent five years or so have been in Asia. If you pick up a vintage "R" you should be ok. EDIT: Searched for the charring temperature of cotton, and stumbled over this paper on low temperature combustion of wood. Interesting read. Maintains that larger pieces of wood can burst into flames after long term exposure to as little as 77 deg. centigrade! Sorry for veering way off topic. http://www.doctorfire.com/low_temp_wood1.pdf
Hi everyone I buought tow of fms f3 stoves about tow mounth ago and have some experience i like to explain for everyone who wants to buy one of this stoves. First of all i changed the fuel bottles of each stoves with a bigger firemaple bottle in the market because they looked bigger and better in quality . But after using them i saw a bad leakage then i tried to fix it. After a lot of searching i understood the threads of the bottles are tilt. In my opinion that was awful.after learning a good lesson about chinese products i bought a primus fuel bottle and problem solved.sorry if i cant speak english very well but i felt it may be useful for our friends in this forum.
In my view the design philosophy of the older Optimus type stoves including the svea is the main thing. There is only one moving part, the valve. The seal on the valve is also important. All of the modern stoves use some kind of rubber o ring to seal the valve spindle. In my opinion nothing beats the graphite washer on those older stoves as a valve packing. From a durability standpoint I simply can't imagine them failing in use. The only trouble with them is they can break when the valve is disassembled. I have a book called 'long distance hiking; lessons from the Appalachian trail.' In this admittedly dated book surveys of hikers show that the 123 is rated very highly from a reliability standpoint. Many of the hikers have switched to some form of ultralight alcohol stove.
