I'll add one more tid-bit of info here, to fill tank with air, you HAVE to use some sort of hand/low pressure pump. If you try with an air compressor (mine at shop is 100psi) nothing will go in. Part of the safety feature to keep you from overpressuring things
Yeah we used a bicycle pump. Didn't take long to get to the top of the green zone. But I'd bet one of those new cordless tire inflators with automatic cutoff settings would work VERY well. Have you ever tried dialing down your compressor output regulator to 8 or 10 psi? Your thoughts?
@MissileMike my first thought when I tried to pressurize it was that something was plugged. Till I took somethings apart and realized my folly. I'd bet you're correct, if I used a regulator would probably work. But just do the bike pump thing. Reading back thru this old thread, I'm gonna have to see if my pre-heat shield fits my slots now.....
I dreamed of every GPA I own running full blast on a snowy, cold winter evening with us all in shorts and bathing suits. They would all be warmed up and at a fairly low "idle" at 5 or so psi, .3 bar, daisy chained together with tubing and with one turn of the regulator, all would near instantly be running at 40 or so psi, the 3 bar range. Space station folks would comment about the mysterious intense light and the heat signature on their instruments needing re-calibration. Folks miles away would look at their watches wonder why sunrise already? Did we drink all night? Rooster all over the country would start their morning call. Black vans would start driving by my house daily. You know, the normal dream,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Yeah, a good bike pump only takes a few strokes. I don't recall having to re-pump them during a meal prep or service. But, I wasn't a Culinary Specialist. I was just on KP for one 45 day field exercise. haha!
I was an Army cook in the late 80s and used these a lot. I can attest that when the overpressure release kicks in, it'll scare the bejeezus out of you. I was stationed at Ft. Wainwright, AK and had to deal with these in an artic environment. Something that I highly doubt the designers factored into their design. We stored them outside in sub zero temperatures and that made the pre-heater pretty much useless. We tried placing two of the pre-heating shields on them to completely cover the generator (for some reason my memory is telling me we called that part something else). If that was enough to get it pre-heated, it still took a very, very long time to get it hot enough to ignite the main burner. We tried propane torches but those required you to hold the torch and we were typically trying to get several pre-heated at once. Sometimes we'd use the torch to try and heat the end furthest from the pre-heater. Regardless, they were a huge pain to preheat. It wasn't that uncommon to have issues with gas weeping out of the air intake even after they were lit and running for a while. Another issue was that rubber is brittle at the temperatures that we were working with. Gaskets don't seal well, if at all, and they crack very easily. This contributed further to the burners leaking gasoline. As such, that leads to a little story. We had been on a field training exercise for a couple weeks in the middle of nowhere Alaska serving T-rations. They come with cardboard plates that resemble the ones you had in your grade school cafeteria. Because it was so cold out, soldiers complained that their food was stone cold by the time they got from the MKT (mobile kitchen trailer) back to their tent (or wherever they were going to eat it). Our CO took up the cause and told us to get and use the Styrofoam clam shell containers that are used by a lot of restaurants for carry out. We brought cases of those to the field with us and the longer were were out there, the more of the cardboard plates we accumulated since they were included in the cases along with the T-rations. We needed somewhere to put them so our NCOIC had us tossing them up under side skirts of the MKT. They were sealed in thin plastic bags (like grocery bags). Because the M2 burners were difficult to keep up to temp, they were constantly weeping gas out of the air intake. Gasoline puddled up in the slots where we would insert the M2s and eventually, they'd spill over onto the floor of the trailer and leak down through the cracks onto the hundreds of bags of cardboard plates (you probably see where this is headed). One day, our NCOIC had an idea to combat the difficulties of pre-heating the M2s. He took a lit M2 (inside the MKT) and placed it on the floor. He then took a cold M2 that had just come in from being stored outside and flipped it upside down on top of the lit one. The unlit burner started raining gas down onto the lit one and within a second or two there was an eight foot column of flame in a seven foot trailer. Our NCOIC told us to run and get fire extinguishers and that took us a minute because per the SOP, the fire point was some silly distance from the MKT. By the time we got back with the fire extinguishers it was a lost cause. The fire had made it to some of the puddles of gas beneath other M2 burners and the flames were too much to do anything about. Our NCOIC bailed out of the MKT and we all stood back and watched it burn. There was no ability to fight it with fire trucks and water since we were in the field. The cardboard plates, in plastic bags, soaked in gasoline eventually caught fire and then it became a real show. Up to that point, it was just flames and smoke rolling out from under the canopy of the MKT. Once the plates caught fire, it became a twenty foot diameter pilar of flame that was probably one hundred feet tall, emitting tons of black smoke. Everyone from the FTX came around to see what was going on. When it was all over, the only thing that was left was the axle and the wheels. Everything else was aluminum and melted. The spot where the MKT was looked like an artillery shell had landed there. It was a circular black spot surrounded by snow, so the black really stood out. TL/DR: The M2 can be dangerous, especially in an artic environment.
I forgot to mention that the 'generator' is indeed filled with steel wool. They showed us in AIT how much steel wool was inside. It didn't look like that much would fit inside, but I guess it does. It's been a long time ago, but I feel like they said it was three pounds of it.
Well I guess the secret of Army SOS will remain classified. Pity. I vaguely remember one of the Army cooks had an Army Cook T-shirt he sometimes wore off duty that showed a skeleton guy with a spoon, and “Death From Within!” logo. I thought it was hilarious, but apparently some posts did not allow that shirt to be worn on or off duty, some commanding generals lacked a refined sense of humor. LOL
