@Boron40 Very well done Ron, your determination and investigative skills paid off in resolving an elusive problem, and giving you - and readers of your post - an insight into the Apex you/we otherwise wouldn’t have had. Many thanks for the update. It’s slways good to hear an outcome, especially when it’s good news! John
@presscall Hi John, sorry for dropping the ball on responding back to you with an update as to exactly why it ran perfectly and would stop and would not re-light and was effectively dead when just minutes before it was running perfectly. I previously mentioned 2 highly significant observations: 1) ... the brass "L-Shaped" end of the internal generator wire was already out of its little tiny hole at the top of the eccentric block 2) I moved the pricker wire by hand all the way in using small hobby needle nose pliers and ran into serious resistance. & I found corrosion at the far end of the pricker wire. The corrosion on the far end of the pricker wire was nearly at the very end of the pricker wire. It created resistance along its entire travel inside the generator tube but when it was pushed fully forward and entered the jet orifice itself the pricker wire became hopelessly wedged in tight and wouldn't budge. ("Hopelessly wedged" is really a silly over the top term to use but I am trying to convery its intense "stuckness"!) The valve "wire-handle" (for user finger control) wouldn't budge and required a moment of serious force to free it and then it traveled freely again. But the secret problem was that at that point it really wasn't free and it wasn't travelling. The amount of momentary force was enough to slightly bend "the brass "L-Shaped" end of the internal generator wire" so it was no longer perpendicular. This allowed that brass L-bend to slip out of the hole at the tip of the eccentric block. So regardless of how much I turned the valve handle it was disconneted from the generator pricker wire leaving the tip with its corrosion solidly wedged inside the jet orifice and effectively acting as a new and very impromptu "STOP-VALVE" stuck in the STOP position!!! And the stove which up to that moment had been running perfectly completely died from lack of fuel and stayed dead untill I removed the generator and used a pair of needle nose pliers to pull the L-Bend and wire back out so I had enough slack to reconnect it to the hole in the top of the eccenric block. And by pulling back on this wire I removed the tip with its corrssion out of the jet orifice causing it to be open and run again. This is where I kept repairing the problem while I was completly unaware that I was repairing it! That was the mechanism of the re-occurring failure which I called intermittent running. As is my habit I often cycle the Coleman flame adjuster valves to get the pricker into the orifice to clean up any crud in the early stages. Cycle the valve back and forth early and often is what I do over years of habit to proactively keep the jet clean. This is the 1st time that that operation caused a problem on the many Coleman backpack stoves I've done this to over the decades. Truly a live and learn experience. Ron
