"Canister fade" is a fact of life with the standard threaded backpacking blended fuel gas canisters. You will certainly have more pressure for a longer time with a larger canister. You'll also have a longer overall burn time. But you will still have some canister fade. I suppose the only way you'll know if the characteristics are satisfactory is to use the stove. Mailing ahead or caching in advance will of course help with this. The real issue though is whether or not the Superfly has acceptable performance compared to your current stove. Therein lies the rub. Most backpackers won't touch the green 16.4 oz propane bottles. Therefore, there's not much in the way of a market for lightweight propane stoves. Coleman has offered several varieties, none have sold well, and all the lightweight ones have been discontinued. You're not going to get too much lighter than your 5438. This relates to the comment I made above. Most backpackers won't carry the extra weight and bulk of a propane stove, particularly if they're taking shorter trips. An awful lot of people take weekend trips or "long weekend" (3 day) trips. It's hard to justify the weight and bulk of a propane stove. I've done a lot of outings with the Sierra Club. Of the hikers out there today, probably 90% carry some time of "blended fuel" gas stove. A few carry "white gas" (Coleman type) fuel. Almost no one I've met in the last 20+ years with the Sierra Club uses propane out on the trail. In fact, I've only met one person -- and he eventually got tired of the weight and bulk and bought a blended fuel gas stove. "Blended fuel" gas canisters, rather than being a boutique fuel are the mainstay of backpacking. Nothing wrong with propane, and nothing wrong with wanting a backpacking stove to go with it; it's just not a common choice, and stove manufacturers go where they can sell the most stoves. Your 5438 might be about as light as you can go. Do you know how much it weighs? HJ
This is an expensive option http://cgi.ebay.com/Change-Gas-cart...tem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item563c0eba8a I think I read somewhere that there is a real danger in using conversion like this thou...something about lightweight stoves, like the Superfly, not being able to handle the higher pressures of propane. b-gin
HJ, The Coleman 5438 weighs nearly 17 oz, (1 lb 0.7 oz) vs. the MSR Superfly at less than 5 oz. (4.7 oz). No doubt about it, the Coleman is a brick, which is why I layed out the shekels for the Superfly in the first place. It was only after taking a trip with the Superfly and seeing how short-lived the small canisters were, and how low the flame burned during the second half of the tank, that my enthusiasm waned. I'd been spoiled by my Coleman Peak 1 Model 400, which is a real volcano. Things went further downhill when it got to the point where I could no longer find even the small canisters of mixed fuel in El Paso, Las Cruces, or Silver City Walmarts. Sometimes I blow through these towns in the evenings, on my way to the trailhead, and haven't time or opportunity or, frankly, any interest in hunting around for a specialty store that is probably not open at that hour anyway. This is why I took to calling it 'boutique fuel', because you have to go to a high-end outdoor adventure boutique to find it. Your point is very perceptive about the gear being designed around a typical 3-day weekend trip. You want to use your fuel up entirely as there is nothing more worthless than a partly used canister. No one wants to start out into the backcountry with a half-full fuel canister, so if you make a habit of buying too large a canister, you will just end up with a closet full of half-empties. I definitely want to give the 'Fly another chance, using the man-sized canister. Any stove that can boast a 3 to 4 minute boil time is not underpowered; it's just a matter of providing an adequate fuel supply.
Morning, BP56, I like the Super Fly, actually. It starts easily, with the piezo ignition, and it boils water quickly. It also simmers very well, indeed. I do not find it as efficient as my new Reactor stove, nor than the Primus Micron, and though I have not yet tested the Reactor in the cold, I'm thinking it might do a tad better then the Super Fly, as does the Micron. But, taken on it's own, the Super Fly is a very good little stove, and well worth using. I have found the larger cannisters of fuel do much better, than the smaller ones, and I now tend to use Primus Power Fuel, almost exclusively. Though I do have a few other brands of fuel on hand, I keep coming back to the PPF cartridges because, for me, they seem to work better in all regards. Also, I have a little Primus Micron lantern, which I use, too. One of the benefits of that little lantern is that it seems to love half empty cartridges!! So, when I notice my stove performance is beginning to drop off, I simply switch the stove to a full cartridge, and burn up the remaining fuel in the half empty, or less, cartridge by using it with the little lantern, which will glow brightly to the very end of the cartridge fuel supply! That's how it has worked for me, anyway. Ahhhh, isn't all this fun?!! Yeah, it most certainly is!! 8) Take care, and God Bless! Every Good Wish, Doc
Hmm. 17oz. I might actually have something lighter than that. Don't know if you would be interested, but maybe I'll pull it out and weigh it just to satisfy my own curiosity. I pretty sure it weighs less than 17oz. I'm actually surprised to hear that since most Walmarts (well, at least ones near me) seem to carry them. That's odd. A lot of time the more general Sporting Goods stores will carry them and certainly the more specialize stores like REI will carry them. I guess who carries them is less of an issue if you can mail ahead. Chickenthief (on this site) actually makes a refill adapter that allows one to refill the "boutique" canisters from the cheap dollar store type upright cylindrical canisters. That's one way to deal with half empties. Before I got a refiller, I just used to use the half empties on day hikes, pic nics, etc. Careful of manufacturer's stated boil times. Those times are usually calculated in lab conditions. A S'fly should be able to boil water around 4 minutes, but 3 minutes is a bit optimistic. In wind, the S'fly will be significantly slower. Definitely check into getting a wind screen. You can get them from eBay. You can also borrow the windscreen from your friend's Whisperlite, although you should not fully enclose a S'fly since too much heat might build up which could cause the tank to rupture. You can also DIY with a few mods to the lid to an aluminum caterer's tray or something similar. Finally, there is a sort of middle road between the backpacking canisters like the Superfly uses and the heavy 100% propane canisters: The Coleman Xpert. The Xpert's Powermax canisters are harder to come by, but they should have them at REI. They're a side laying canister, so you don't have the "canister fade" that you have with an upright canister. They also are a higher propane content (60/40 for powermax vs. 80/20 for standard backpacking canisters). I know BGin (who posted about the adapter above) has one that he wants to sell. They're excellent stoves; I have one. They're not being manufactured currently, but you probably can get a new one for less than $50.00 or a used one for less than $40.00 The Reactor that Doc mentions in his post above is a great stove, and it has two drawbacks: 1) it can only use a pot designed specifically for it because of the shape of its burner, and 2) they're about $160.00 retail. They're very fast, quite wind proof, and they have a regulated burner which makes them less sensitive to canister fade. HJ
Some photos of the type of Coleman stoves I was talking about in my prior post: Coleman Xpert (one burner) Coleman Xpedition (two burners) HJ
BP56 One more thing you might consider -- if you are still bothering to look at this thread. You can greatly delay the decreasing pressure problem with the blended fuel canisters by inverting them such that the liquid mixture rather than the fractionated gas mixture is drawn from the canister. This of course requires a different stove from your superfly but several of the mutlti-fuel stoves will do this very well. Coleman makes a pricey one that is designed to run this way, but others such as the Primus multi-fuel and omnifuel can also be run with canister inverted (and they still are great stoves when run with liquid fuels). The loss of power when the canister is upright is due to two phenomena of these gas stoves. One is that the vaporization of gas in the canister absorbs heat until the canister essentially is too cold to vaporize (warming the canister will take care of this). The second, more sinister cause, is that the propane vaporizes preferentially over the butane or isobutane, so the %propane decrease with time. Both problems are rectified by drawing off liquid rather than gas when the canister is inverted. Seems too simple perhaps, but it actually makes sense and seems to work.
Make sure that any stove you try inverting the canister on has a pre-heat loop (a generator in other words). A stove w/o a pre-heat loop is pretty dangerous when fed liquefied petroleum gas. You'll need a remote canister type stove (where the canister of LPG is attached to the stove via a hose). As Itchy says, the canister fade is not an issue if you invert the canister. The MSR Wind Pro is one such stove, but they're somewhat pricey. The discontinued MSR Rapid Fire can still be had on eBay for quite a bit less than a Wind Pro. HJ
You may or may not find these interesting. I have a few and like them very much. Simple no fuss single burners. Link Link Mike
