I've only seen some old posts hinting on here that it might not work perfectly because the cable that's in a Simmerlite is absent in the Windpro II. I happen to have a couple Optimus lindal-ended pumps and am wondering how it performs using one of these. Is the jet too big? If I put a Simmerlite jet in would be be okay on canister and white gas? I'm looking to hear from someone who's taken the plunge on running the Windpro II like a Simmerlite with a a lindal connection.
@paultee Hopefully someone with experienced answers. But if not, the thoughts you have make sense to me. Prime deeply - kerosene in winter deep - and let us know how you go. I'm confident you will survive the testing. And yes, running a smaller jet when a bigger will do just limits the maximum heat. If the stove vaporises the naphtha you should be able to swap between butane and naphtha on a naphtha jet. The real risk without the internal wire is the inevitable eventual clogging.
I would stick to using white gas (as Simmerlite is white-gas-only), so internal clogging seems like a smaller issue. Guess I'll just have to buy one and play around
For future reference, the Windpro II DOES NOT run on white gas using a Primus ergopump. It runs too rich. The only blue flame you can support on white gas is a med-low simmer. Swapping in a simmerlite jet might help a bit, but I imagine the cable is what really makes a difference. Once I'm bored enough I'll swap in a Simmerlite jet and feed a bike brake cable in there to see if that's enough to make it a "Simmerlite Universal". For comparison, I have a Kovea Booster Calm (white gas only connector) and it has a short cable in it from the junction where the hose reaches the generator. Chinese stoves completely cloned the Kovea connector (Bulin specifically, but possibly others), and a generic gas adapter screws onto the old Kovea Calm seamlessly—effectively turning it into the Kovea Dual Max for a couple of bux. Sorry for the Kovea tangent, but going back to the Windpro II: not usable with lindal white gas pumps out of the box.
The lack of a cable’s not responsible for too rich a mixture, that’s down to the size of the jet orifice. Always, when rigging up ‘bottle’ stoves to be fuelled by butane - I went through a phase (!) - I had to enlarge a spare white gasoline jet orifice, to 0.4mm in the case of an Optimus Nova, to get optimum performance. The reverse is true, an lpg jet will overfuel liquid fuel. Primus recognised this with their Omnifuel and the need to change the jet to the appropriate one for the fuel burned.
In that case, I'll give it a shot now. Would really love a lighter Universal with a Primus pump. So besides being a handy cleaning device, there's no other purpose for the cable?
@paultee The cable also means that the amount of fuel in the heating loop is less relative to the amount of hot metal, allowing vaporisation more efficiently. If you check the generator/vapouriser on older stoves (and some modern ones), they tend to have a coil of copper in the pipe, or sometimes a copper mesh. It just gives more surface area of metal and less volume of liquid. Which is why you will need a really good prime. But I would expect that after that you would do OK. The stoves put out some serious heat. The "simmer" side of things may not run quite so well, but in this case that's hardly a concern- just use butane to simmer.
@Scrambler Ah. Good to know. Despite the Windpro II jet being shown as a separate part in the schematic, I couldn't get it out (and I gave a mighty twist) without fearing I'd strip it. I'm going to set it aside for now. While I imagine MSR did design the Windpro jet to come out and it would with enough coaxing, I'm now wondering if I would have to cannibalize or enlarge the fuel mixing shaft (I'm sure it has a proper name), shown below. The air holes are clearly larger for the Simmerlite (left) than they are on the Windpro II (right). Also it seems MSR changed the shape of the generator loop slightly and removed the metal ring--a kind of lip seen here--on the Windpro II.
