When I spotted this one a few weeks ago, I thought it looked pretty much identical to the Trangia and, for the price, it was definitely worth picking up.
Comes packed in a very well-made and nice-looking box, with some amusing Chinglish blurbs.
The box contains the anodised alloy pot-stand/stove-holder, the stove, stove cap and simmer-ring/cap.
The stove was pretty loose when placed inside the holder, so I had to bend the four tabs on the inside of the
stand to make it a secure. Once that was done, it fitted together nicely.
One nifty little design-advantage over the Trangia is that the simmer ring has a folding ‘handle’ which makes it
very easy to pop it over the stove to snuff it out, rather than the Trangia ‘drop it from a great height’ method!
When compared to the Trangia stove, the dimensions are pretty much identical. The clone stove is ever so
slightly deeper and has alternating big-small-big holes on the burner, but apart from that, there’s not much in it.
The Trangia seems to be made from a different grade/type of brass, compared to the bright and shiny clone.
The screw-on caps are interchangeable and fit on each stove perfectly. The cap o-rings also look the same.
The simmer cap on the clone has very slightly larger diameter than the Trangia, so it wont fit snugly for storage,
but the simmer rings of both stoves are also interchangeable when in use.
Both stoves light easily and take pretty much the same time to ‘jet’.
Interestingly the clone stove has 26 burner holes (13 big & 13 small), whereas the Trangia
has 24 holes – whether this makes any difference in performance, I couldn’t tell.
After a minute or so (I didn’t do any stopwatch timing) both stoves had a nice flame going.
The simmer caps worked the same on both stoves, reducing the flame to a low level.
As I mentioned before, the small folding handle on the clones’ simmer-cap was a great little innovation:
The next step was to do the traditional boil-test. I assembled the stove,
filled my kettle and set it to boil. It took the usual 5-6 minutes.
In summary, I think it was $15 well-spent and I’m looking forward to giving it a
test in a proper outdoors environment – a return trip to Snake Island, anyone?
