The Quest for the lightest backpacking stove

First, the fuel: I used Coghlan's hexamine tablets. These appear to be in short supply at the moment -- few of the online vendors have them. The deal with the hexamine tablets is that they're very stable and reliable -- no moving parts, they burn hot no matter the conditions (though they don't have enough energy to do well with snow, use a white gas stove for that), and they're relatively light and compact. Three of them will boil 20oz of water, which is enough to cook a typical freeze-dried meal. I can fit 36 of them plus the stove into my Snow Peak 30fl. oz. titanium cookpot/pan set (right).

These came with a folding stove, the unmodified one on the left. It weighed 3.8 ounces. It had two problems -- it was heavy, and it was too wide for my pot (a 30oz pot is small, and the Snow Peak pot is tall and narrow, more like a big cup than a real pot). My first modification was to cut it down to size, replacing the bottom plate with a piece of aluminum flashing properly bent to fit. That's the stove on the right. That weighed 3 ounces.

But it seemed to me that lighter was possible. On Sgt. Rock's Stove Page I had seen his Cat Stove, an alcohol stove built out of cat food cans. It had a wire mesh ("hardware cloth") pot holder. It seemed to me that I could string two wires across this in an X, and set a thin disk of stainless steel mesh cut out of a grease strainer, and have a much lighter and hotter burning stove. So I went to Home Depot and bought a roll of 1/2" hardware cloth for, I think, $6.95, and cut out a square of it and rolled it into a circle. I tied it together with wire, and ran two wires across.

The first thing I tried was the stainless steel mesh. That resulted in flames shooting two feet into the air when I lit off the hexamine tablets! The problem is that hexamine fumes are apparently heavier than air. They settled below the mesh, then caught afire, heating the mesh, heating the hexamine tabs to cause them to vaporize even faster, and it turned into a runaway blaze that consumed the tablets within 4 minutes and thirty seconds. When you see my pot and compare it to the shiny pot at the top of this page, now you know why my pot looks kinda heat-hazed :-).

So instead of the stainless steel mesh, the next thing I tried was a disk of heavy aluminum foil cut out of an oven liner pan (99 cents at K-Mart). I cut it into a rough circle using scissors, then stuffed it in there so that it fit tightly. This worked great. At the left you can see how it looks after it's been fired with 3 tablets. 3 tabs will boil 20 oz of water in 6 minutes. 4 tabs may be necessary under windy or extremely cold conditions. You see the sticky deposit that the hexamine tablets leave. That's the only thing I don't like about hexamine -- that deposit is water soluble (easy to wash off), but messy until you do so. To the right is what the pot looks like on top of the stove, without the windscreen. The scorch marks on the concrete in the background are from when I tried this with the stainless mesh!

The combo pot holder/tablet holder looks flimsy, but I put about 10 pounds of pressure on top of the pot while it was on top of the pot holder, and it didn't budge. The tablets are so light (0.6 ounces for three) that they don't begin to stress the foil-and-wire tablet holder portion of this setup. The whole pot holder/tablet holder weighs 0.7 ounces.

Here is what it looks like with the aluminum flashing windscreen (a strip of aluminum flashing the height of the pot, wrapped around and held with paper clips). I don't know how much the flashing cost, BTW, it's been in my storeroom for years, I just happened to see it when I was looking for something to make a windscreen out of. The windscreen keeps the wind from blowing out the tablets. The air holes, which were cut out with a pair of tin snips, are faced *away* from the wind, and allow air to get to the fuel. This windscreen is a bit on the porkish side, it weighs 1.8 ounces. There are others who have made windscreens out of lighter aluminum foil (rather than aluminum flashing). I have considered that, but this windscreen is very sturdy and will not blow away in the wind, and you can coil it tighter around the pot for transport. The stove will drop straight into the pot (you can see that it is smaller in diameter than the pot) and leave enough room on top for 36 hexamine tablets still in their wrappings, or roughly four days worth of fuel if you cook three meals a day (if you cook two meals a day and eat ready-to-eat food for the other meal, that's six days worth of fuel). The total weight of stove, windshield, and four days worth of fuel is 7.2 ounces of fuel, 1.8 ounces of windshield, and 0.7 ounces of stove, for a total weight of 9.7 ounces.

Comparison with commercial stoves

The other possible type of commercial backpacking stove is the canister stove. This uses an isobutane/propane mix in a pressurized canister, a setup which works fine above freezing, iffy below freezing (but then, the hexamine tabs aren't so great there either -- that's when you want the Whisperlite). I decided on the Snow Peak canister stove. Its feet fit my pot perfectly (as you'd expect, since it's a Snow Peak pot!). The stove weighs in at 11.5 ounces with a single can of fuel. I haven't devised a windscreen for it yet, so I'll just assume 1.8 ounces of windscreen, for a total weight of 13.3 ounces. One canister of the Snow Peak fuel is supposed to last for 45 minutes, and it took me 3:45 to get my 20oz of water boiling. So that works out to be about as much water boiled as the 36 hexamine tabs, for 3.6 ounces more weight. However, it will simmer (not that I can simmer in that titanium pot!), and it will boil water in a shorter time than the hexamine stove, and if I am boiling a smaller amount of water (such as a cup of water for some hot cocoa on the trail) I can boil the water then turn it off, unlike the hexamine tabs, which always burn for 8 to 12 minutes before they go out regardless of how long it took to boil the water. So it's a tossup between the canister stove and the tablet stove -- the tablet stove is simpler, more reliable (no moving parts!), and unbreakable (only thing you could do to it is step on the thing, but even then you can probably bend it back into shape), but it won't work in the rain (the fuel goes out when it gets wet), you can't simmer, and you can't just boil a cup of water with it. Since I value simplicity and reliability over features I will take the tablet stove on my next trip. However, if the tablets become hard to find, I won't weep too hard about taking the canister stove instead.

I'm aiming at a total pack weight of 15 pounds, prior to adding food and water (which should be another 10 pounds or so, for a total pack weight of under 30 pounds). It appears that I'm well on the way to doing that, since I'm down to 20 at the moment, and about to chop another 4 pounds off with a lightweight pack (GVP G-4). That should make my future outings far more pleasant than the times I spent humping 50 pounds around on my back.

Technical assistance for this page provided by His Royal Majesty President Boy George The Cat, Defender of the Catnip, Warmer of Laps, Ruler of My Household (albeit without the collusion of the Supreme Court and funny doings in Florida, unlike the *OTHER* President Boy George).