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Posted by Bill S on June 30, 2008 at 8:35:12 pm EDT
In reply to MSR Standard Pump upgrade posted by trouthunter on June 29, 2008 at 11:14:10 pm EDT

I'm not sure I would call it a "problem". It is just the way backpacking stoves are. The liquid fuel stoves are all basically the same design that was made by the original Primus company in Sweden in the 19th Century, with the 2 basic burner types - the "roarer" and the "silent" burners. The Svea 123, MSR XGK, Primus multi-fuel stoves, and similar ones are the "roarer" burner, while the MSR Whisperlite and Simmerlite, Coleman 2-burner car camping stoves, and most compressed gas stoves are the "silent" type (2 sub-types - the stacked waffle plate like the Whisperlite and the multi-hole kind like the Simmerlite). For most backpacking, simmering is not of real concern - how much simmering did anyone do on campfires?

Only gourmet camp cooks (like Barb and me) worry about low heat vs med heat vs high heat. The way to control the heat level is to control the rate of fuel flow and/or distance from the flame. Stoves with a needle valve allow you to do this to some extent, but having to pressurize liquid fuel stoves with a pump makes control of the flame difficult - it's either full pressure or off. In other words, not the jet or burner design intrinsically, but the means of controlling the fuel flow rate to the burner. The single valve is pretty sloppy and inaccurate for this. The two-stage valve like the Dragonfly has (and some in the Primus multifuel family) is ok, but requires too much maintenance. That's why gourmet campchefs use compressed gas - easier to control the fuel flow, hence the heat level.

Note that all the effort recently for stove improvements has been toward getting as much of the heat as possible into the pot - the MSR heat exchanger of old that surrounded the pot, the Jetboil heat exchanger on the pot, and more recently Optimus/Brunton, Primus, Coleman, and MSR with their "improved" versions of Jetboil's approach. Few are gourmet outdoor chefs like us (ok, I confess, I mostly want to get the meal done - breakfast so I can get on the trail, and supper so I can hit the sack - but sometimes, I like to get out the wok and do some fancy stirfry).

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